[wannabe]

This is a long one, and crazy too. I took a nap this afternoon, and this is what happened while I slept. I RARELY have dreams that make sense even after waking up, and this is pretty close, in that it was consistent and mostly logical.

So I'm in the house I grew up in, and my cat, Bobbi, walks up to me on her hind legs and starts talking to me in Lacey's voice, wondering where she is, and who I am. I scoop her up and she gets all upset at the way I'm holding her - you scoop cats up in a way that would be rude (to say the least) to do to a woman - and tried to hold her the way you hold a cat, which she was also upset about because, again, that's not how you treat a lady.

My cat has never talked before, and certainly not in Lacey's voice, so I ask her what the deal is after setting her on the bed to keep her from clawing me, and she says she doesn't know, one minute she was waking up in bed and the next she was in a strange bed and everything got bigger. 3 hour time difference.

My cat usually slept on my mom's bed at all times of the day unless I came to get her, and for her to be walking and talking, this seemed odd, so I mention who she sounds like, and she says, "That's me!" And she looks at herself and sees she's a cat now. Her fur color has changed to brown and her eyes are brown too, but I can't believe this is really Lacey.

I want to know why, if someone turned her into a cat, she would spontaneously appear in MY house, 3000 miles away from her home. (I didn't grow up in Florida, but for some reason, I knew I was IN Florida now. This "made sense" because I can make my house move sometimes.) To which SHE says she wasn't in Cali, she was in Mississippi, and then I realized I was also in Mississippi, that I wouldn't have to go all the way to Cali, I'd only have to drive about 100 miles from Jackson to Purvis. (So much for the 3 hour time difference, but that knowledge was gone now. I was just there for a family thing, so that must be why I thought I was there now.)

But of course, I still didn't believe this was really Lacey, I thought I was just insane. This was further reinforced by my brother coming in and petting the cat, and not being able to hear her talk, and apparently not noticing how her fur was a different color all of a sudden.

I decide that she's going to have to prove she's really Lacey, that she's going to have to tell me something I wouldn't know about her, but that I could look up and see was the truth. She started by telling me some things that not many people know, but that I do, and I said, "How do I know you're not just reading my mind?" So she tells me some other things, and then I get on the internet and try to track down that information, but I don't find it (because it's something I actually don't know, and apparently couldn't invent something to fool myself), so I don't believe.

But she keeps begging me to just take her back to Purvis, because what she CAN do is lead me to her grandmother's house, where she was staying, and where her mom and dad are and she can convince them it's really her.

Okay, I'm a big fan of her parents, and hey, maybe this really IS Lacey, and maybe they'll all be so grateful that they'll let me go out with her and maybe her mom will sign my stamp collection. (No idea where that came from. I don't have autographs in my stamp book, and haven't even looked in it in 20-some years. I guess it was just a handy place for such a thing.)

So I agree to take her where she wants to go. First I try the car, but for some reason, I can never dream a car is traveling very fast, and she noticed this and said we could walk faster than this. Okay, so I try to run with super-speed, but that has the same problem. THEN I remember I can just teleport. I wind up in the middle of Purvis (been there for real once, not long ago, and the other day, trying to locate Crissy's restaurant, I spent a while looking at maps) and no cat.

How stupid of me to forget how to bring things with me when I teleport! But I can fix that, I just retcon the jump, and now she's in my arms, and I scratch her behind the ears and she's like "That feels good. I'm starting to FEEL like a cat! We have to hurry!"

"OK," I say, "but if we get there and Lacey is there, I'm just gonna say 'whoops, wrong house', and run like the chicken I am before she sees me."

So she tells me where to go, and since I suddenly can't walk, I teleport from block to block until we reach a house that looks suspiciously like MY grandmother's house, back in the little town I grew up in. All of Purvis now looks like my hometown, but I don't really notice this as a contradiction. In my mind, this is Lacey's grandmother's house.

So I knock on the door, feeling surprisingly not nervous. And who answers the door but Miss Julie. I like her (for real), and I don't want to look like a fool in front of her, so I just stand there like an idiot not knowing what to say. I haven't prepared for this, and I'm not a quick thinker. She realizes I'm star-struck, and tries to break the ice by complimenting my cat. Who is now screaming at me to say something.

"Uhhhh.... By any chance, has Lacey been acting weird today?" I finally manage to say.

"Well now that I think of it, she has been. She's been licking herself (like a cat taking a bath) and she rubbed my legs while I was making breakfast and almost tripped me, and the dogs (the chihuahuas) are afraid of her all of a sudden. And her hair's black now too. Why do you ask?"

"Um... my cat here claims that SHE is Lacey." At which point, she jumps into her mother's arms and tries to tell her it's really her. But since I'm the only one who can understand her, I have to tell Miss Julie everything she's saying in her attempt to convince her it's really her.

Right about then, I see Lacey crawling around on the floor, on her hands and knees, and she comes over to me and starts rubbing my leg with her face the way cats do. I kneel down and she rubs my face with hers and I pat her head and scratch it and talk to her like I do my cat. Obviously, Lacey and my cat have traded brains. (I don't know if I thought it was Friday, or "Freaky Friday"; earlier in the day, I'd downloaded some Mean Girls trailers I'd never seen before, plus the bloopers and the making of, and watched them, and maybe I was thinking about Lindsey for some reason. Lacey had nice things to say about her.)

So now I have a tough decision to make. We have no idea how this happened, and therefore no way to know how to fix it, so, do I keep the cat with the brain of the girl of my dreams, or do I keep the girl of my dreams with the brain of my cat? I mean, the girl-in-cat probably won't want to stay with me, will probably miss her family too much, but at least I get to talk to her and learn all kinds of neat things about my fave girl, and the cat-in-girl will be hard to explain to my mom and her breath will smell like cat food before long, but hey, it's a girl that will let me hold her and brush her hair as long as I want to. (Can I just have both?)

I started waking up just a little, and gained a little bit of control over the dream. What I really wanted was both, but I wanted both of them to be themselves, so I took the cat and made Lacey hold it, and then they switched back. Lacey was so happy to be back in her body that she started showering my face with kisses. And then she licked my nose a couple times, and I said "You better not be my dog now".

And then I woke up enough to start realizing I didn't have to be the captain of the shy team, I could shower her face in kisses right back, and her mom wasn't gonna say a thing about it, but then Lacey got upset that I had treated her like a cat and made me leave, and didn't even let me have my cat back. She probably dressed my cat up in dog clothes, too, but I woke up before I could demand my cat back.