Dream: Centipede Possums

Centipede sized mammal, grey hairs like the bristles of a pipe-cleaner, but soft, crawling across the bed. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. It stayed there. It seemed like I was sharing the bed with Jamie and another couple, or they were in the vicinity. We were trying to figure out what this thing was and where it came from. When I
looked back at my hand, it had grown. Now I was starting to recognize it. "Oh! It's a possum!" I said with a tinge of horror, even though it looked more like some sort of rat or guinea pig with long spiky hair. I think it had little buck teeth. Then I noticed another one. Small, like when I saw the first, but when I picked it up, it started to grow too. Like they were feeding off of my touch. I put the both of them down on my bedside table. I was starting to get worried. Where did these baby possums come from? I said something like, "Where there are baby possums, there's a mama possum," and "Great, we have possums
living in our..." Did I say house or apartment? I don't know. Then a memory came to me of two possums that had turned up indoors. For some reason we never did anything about them. It's those possums, I thought. I imagined them hiding somewhere, the mother possum surrounded by squirming bristly buck-toothed things, trying to nurse. I got up — I'd been sitting up in bed this whole time — and I started looking around for some way to get rid of these two baby possums I'd found. I didn't have it in me to squash them, although it did cross my mind. I started looking for something big enough to catch both of them in. I looked back at my bedside table and they were gone. I kept looking. I found a tall ceramic cup, roughly the size of a pint glass, and I started looking around the room for the babies. There were small piles of clothes scattered around my side of the bed. I tried to sift through them a little bit, somewhat afraid of what I might find. Then I saw one squirming around, its back end sticking out from some article of clothing. I picked it up. Scooped it up with the cup, rather. Then took it out of the cup and looked at it. Hmm. These things are looking more like cats, I thought. Wait a minute. This is a cat. Jamie and I agreed. It looked like Stripe, but much younger and smaller. Stripe is about four to four-and-a-half months old now. This kitten looked about 7 or 8 weeks, maybe. But we'd seen this kitten around, eating the cat food, hanging out and doing kitten things, etc., but we had confused him with Stripe. Despite the difference in size/age, we just assumed he was Stripe. Too busy, maybe, to give it much thought. We decided that he was a neighborhood cat that had snuck into our apartment/house, perhaps repeatedly, mooching off of our love and food, sometimes staying for days at a time.