A Clairvoyants Guide to the Otherworld

The first time I visited the Otherworld was when I was eleven. One moment I’d been having some peaceful dream I hardly remember, and the next, I was shooting up in bed with a gasp. I pulled my blanket tighter around myself as I looked around uneasily.

Something was wrong. The sensation of wrongness was the first thing I remember feeling. The reasons why I felt so became clearer as I took time to look around. My room was far too dark and gloomy. My lava lamp was gone. The posters on my walls were missing. My pair of crammed bookshelves were filled with unfamiliar and disarranged books. Half the stuff on my bedside table was gone; brushes, toys, the pieces of artwork I’d been in the middle of working on. The only things left were my small mirror and cassette player.

My heart clenched tighter as I leaned forward to peer through the bedroom window.

The details outside were all wrong too, I thought, although as I searched with my eyes it was difficult to pinpoint exactly how. It was just so empty and still, I concluded. I felt as if I were staring into a photograph rather than through a window. There was no wind, no movement, and everything was completely, perfectly silent.

Typically, you would hear the occasional car driving by, and the chirps of crickets and the creaks and cracks of the house. Soft, subtle sounds you were hardly conscious of. Not now.

I waited a minute, and then two. I heard literally nothing except for the faint moan of what might have been a faraway wind.

The rest of my house seemed equally foreign to me. The door to my aunt and uncle’s rooms were hanging half open. Their beds were both empty, their rooms appearing unfamiliar and alien as mine was. I felt like I was an intruder in someone else’s house.

I could hardly stop shivering as I ran down the stairs, calling out their names. The only answer was that extremely faint, almost inaudible, oscillating howl of wind. It possessed an unsettlingly humanlike quality.

I’d started crying as I ran outside, though I hardly realized it. A thin sheet of fog covered the streets, drifting languidly around me, never extending through the doorway of my house.

Lamp posts spilled blurry, dull yellow light onto the street. The sky was a yawning, abyssal darkness entirely absent of stars. The street seemed too large and too small at the same time. All the cars I would usually see parked around the neighbourhood were gone.

It was colder outside. Too cold. I didn’t remember it ever being this cold, not ever, even during the winter months of the year.

I shuffled forward across the pave walk. I wasn’t sure where I was planning to go. I had some vague thought of finding someone who would help me escape this horrible place.

Nothing around me felt real. I made my way across the length of the street and then back again, stopping once or twice to look around in disbelief as I tried to make sense of my surroundings and process the uncanny, subtle differences between the real world and whatever this was.

Houses which appeared familiar and benign in the daylight now looked foreboding, as if the dark windows concealed something sinister and twisted within. With increasing frequency I found myself imagining humanoid beings as disturbed and malformed as my surroundings lurking inside as they silently observed me.

Soon, the panic took over. I called out. I screamed and yelled until my throat itched. There was never an answer.

Once my throat was hoarse and my voice weak and ragged, I sprinted back to my house and returned to my room. I remember telling myself over and over again it had to be a dream. So I tried to wake myself up all the ways you usually do when you think you’re stuck in a bad dream.

Pinching and slapping myself, sprinting around in circles and then splashing water on my face repeatedly. I would have tried jumping down the stairs but I couldn’t gather the courage to do that. This world felt far too realistic for such a daring and reckless feat.

Once all else had failed, I curled up under my blankets; the only solace I could find, and lay there for what felt like forever. Each minute melded together seamlessly into what had become an extended waking nightmare.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Hours most likely, and they were some of the worst hours of my life. But the experience didn’t last forever as I began to suspect it would. An unknown amount of time later, I woke up. Seven years have passed since my first visit. They were years of me living a normal life in the daytime and spending time every other night alone in a lonely, eerie world I would later come to learn was named the Otherworld by the scattered inhabitants who shared my abilities to psychically project themselves there.

During this time, I learned how to survive the Otherworld. Eventually, I even came to call it a second home. Most of the time, the Otherworld appears as one giant, endless liminal space. A dark and creepy reflection of the real world, though an oddly peaceful one too. Sometimes, it can even be strangely beautiful.

It seems, most of the time, completely devoid of any kind of life. It isn’t, though, and it is important not to forget that.

Six years after the first manifestation of my powers I had no more control over my visits to the Otherworld during my sleep, but by that time it was no longer the frightening and unknown nightmarescape I’d first made it out to be. I found ways to work through the fear and loneliness, reassured with the knowledge my visits would never last more than a couple hours.

I said that the Otherworld is an empty, liminal reflection of the surface world, but that isn’t the whole truth. Here and there are hidden places you can’t find in the real world. That’s what I came here to talk about. Not just the Otherworld, but the many dark secrets concealed within it. Over the subsequent weeks and months, I would become less scared of the Otherworld and more bored with it. It was never less than a few hours I would need to spend there before I could wake up and return to my normal life. It was one of the unspoken rules of this place.

To deal with the boredom, I read each one of the new books in my room (at least, the ones which were legible), and restlessly paced the walls of my home. After a while, I began to cautiously venture deeper into the mysterious, alien world outside. With every exploration, my curiosity grew stronger.

I’ve come to learn that the Otherworld can be both beautiful and horrible. The first story I want to share with you will introduce you to both sides of it; the good and the bad.

I came across something intriguing during one of my routine explorations of the Otherworld three years ago. I’d been walking the streets for over an hour – I could actually measure time because I’d learned that watches (unlike phones) work in the Otherworld, though sometimes they’re stuck within a different time zone.

In the midst of my wandering, I stumbled across a part of the dark and silent city which was coated in what (first) looked to me like very thin and tattered white cloth.

I began following innumerable strands of feather soft silk seemingly stretching on forever throughout the streets of the city. They cascaded across the walls and tops of buildings, and hung in velvety strings over the roads.

The patterns of the gossamer seemed to become more complex the closer I examined them, making me feel disoriented and a little dizzy if I looked at them for too long. The whole thing was like a piece of abstract artwork. It looked kind of like an optical illusion art piece, but as if you were looking at it while tripping out. I imagined some troubled and obsessed artist spent their entire lifetime working to perfect and expand it.

The net of silk grew thicker around me, blanketing parts of houses and gardens and forming circular spires and archways which rose several meters high into the air above me.

The further I went, the more intricate and detailed the patterns of the web became. At the same time, the surface was becoming increasingly sticky to the point where it stretched outward a foot or two when I tried to pull my hand away. I felt as if my hand were glued to the material.

What was weirder was that only some of the silk was sticky this way. Other parts hardly stuck to my skin at all. The non-sticky parts were almost imperceptibly different in colour and texture from the stickier ones.

A couple minutes into my journey through the sea of frozen, suspended white, I caught glimpses of  sporadic movement from part of the web. I traced them to a hammock shaped net hanging a little distance to the right of me. I understood what it was when I came closer.

The Otherworld isn’t completely empty, like I said earlier. I shared the world with various things both human and otherwise. You’ll inevitably encounter some of them if you spend long enough over here.

Caught up in the pale patchwork of silk was one such creature I’d become familiar with over the past couple of years.

It was kind of what I considered to be part of the native (ecosystem?) of the Otherworld. This insectoid creature would move about with unnatural speed, almost always staying in the periphery of my vision, so I was never sure if they were really there. They looked like giant, translucent bugs. They’d always creeped me out, but I got the feeling they were more afraid of me than I was of them. We never bothered each other much, and I was okay with them if they stayed out of my way.

I definitely didn’t like seeing one trapped so helplessly, though it did help me understand the reality of the situation I’d gotten myself into.

I was walking through one massive spider web. A spiderweb which must have spanned miles of the city, yet one which I’d somehow never seen before in all my years of exploring the Otherworld.

Then something more important occurred to me. What type of spider lives in a web so large? I shivered and pulled my woollen coat tighter against myself.

I came toward the creature hesitantly, and as I did, it jerked violently as it attempted to lift its legs from the surface of the web. The movements it made as I closed the distance doubled in intensity, and they sent a small ripple across the web – a silent, surging wave like a gust of wind. The creature looked terrified but weak, its struggles dying down as quickly and abruptly as they’d escalated.

Then, out of the periphery of my vision, I saw something else move. The white shape almost completely blended into the surface of the web. It was yet more difficult to pick out through the gloom combined with the distance between it and where I was standing. The shape was multi jointed, large and lithe, nearly impossible to make sense of.

A normal spider has eight legs. This one had many, many more. Some of them were short, while others stretched on further into the web surrounding it. Some appendages waved slowly in the air like pincers, drifting lazily from side to side.

I froze as I stared up at it. The spider was stone still, so still I almost thought the shape of it – the only thing I could clearly make out – had been conjured up by my imagination from the complexity of the web.

I waited for another sign of movement for a minute. I didn’t catch anything.

I was gathering the courage to turn my back on the sight as I inched my way toward the bug-thing to get a closer look at it.

That was when I heard the first meow. It was coming from somewhere further away, where the web was at its thickest. The sound was panicked and high pitched.

I took another glance at the bug thing, which had fallen limp again, a grey blur against the more pale shades of the web. I felt guilty for leaving it like that. But the sound of another meow drew my attention away quickly. I would come back later, I told myself, after I went to investigate the source of the meowing.

I was moving before I’d registered what I was doing, walking alongside the large, soft spheres of white light cast by the streetlights. The houses gave way on one side to a flat, grassy park, where I could see several more mounds completely wrapped in silk which were hanging the greater part of the web. They swayed slightly underneath along with the innumerable rope like strands supporting them. Looking closer, I saw the silk ascending into the trees, draping over their many limbs like Christmas lights.

I moved within touching distance of one or two of these cocoons as I continued searching for the origins of the noise. The pair were both loosely tucked inside a faded, red tube which formed a part of some play equipment at the centre of a glassy field. They were stuffed and bulging like overfilled rubbish bags. One was moving slightly, the surface shifting as something wriggled within. The other two were completely still.

As I peered closer, I glimpsed what was inside the moving one, and I immediately regretted looking.

It looked like some kind of young deer. That is the closest thing I could compare it to. Its skin was albino white and hairless. It was paralyzed, starving and emaciated. Its eyes stared out at me pitifully, full of pain and suffering.

I turned away quickly and kept moving.

It wasn’t long after that before I closed in on the source of the sound I’d heard. What I guessed to be a year old, short haired cat was tangled up in the spiderweb. I’m not so good with breeds, though I can say it was white, with large paws and still larger, mismatched eyes and a very fluffy tail.

The cat looked like it had jumped up onto the web in an attempt to climb or possibly leap over it. Now it was stuck suspended at an awkward sideways angle as it wriggled helplessly. It turned its head to mew at me as I came closer.

The task of helping it was a daunting one. Of course, I had to try.

Fortunately, the creature wasn’t too far off the ground, and I thought I could probably reach it if I climbed up to a branch of one of the nearby trees hanging directly over it. It wasn’t easy freeing the cat. It took me several attempts just to tear apart the thinnest of the rope like threads binding it.

I started with one of its front paws, and the cat immediately began to panic, causing multiple small but definitive tremors through the surface of the web.

‘I’m trying to help you’, I whispered quickly. I rubbed the back of its head with one finger. ‘Please, just be still, alright?’

I stared into the cat’s eyes, and I’m pretty sure I must have come to some understanding with it, because the cat calmed down a bit and let me work its second front paw out of the tangles of stringy web.

I took note that the cat really did have large paws, eyes, and tail. Like they were cartoonishly large. It was something more than your everyday housecat, I guessed.

I couldn’t have known then how right I would turn out to be.

Every time I glanced up at where I was fairly sure the spider was, I thought I saw it in a slightly different position on the web, but I was never positive if it was really moving around or if I was getting paranoid.

As I took turns alternately focusing on the cat and the rest of the web, I had to slow my movements down so I didn’t get my feline companion more tangled up and undo all the progress I’d made.

With every passing minute I became more convinced the spider was about to come after me. It didn’t help having to accept I had no idea where it really was anymore.

My hands shook increasingly, and my gaze flickered restlessly over the length of the web, searching for any sign of movement. I found myself becoming more focused on envisioning the arachnid catching me and not nearly enough on freeing the cat.

In the end, I allowed myself to become too careless, and I did exactly what I’d been trying not to do. In a moment of frustrated impatience targeting a particularly stubborn knot sticking to the cat my movements caused a large ripple to disperse off into the fog in multiple directions.

Moments later, I glimpsed something moving through the fog; silently, lazily shifting and swaying as it did. I heard a squeaking meow coming from beside me.

The spider was approaching slowly and deliberately. As it turned its large body to move toward me, I caught a glimpse of what was in its mouth, suggesting what the spider had been in the middle of doing when I caught its attention. Its mouth was dripping with black blood and viscera, grinding back and forth rhythmically as it moved. I thought I could hear the crunching and crackling sounds it was making as it worked down its latest meal.

The spider was in the middle of consuming something wrapped in a large lump of silk, using countless limbs to tear at the silk and whatever was inside it, and lift various pieces toward the dark mass of its mouth, the silk still wrapped about them.

I leapt down lightly from the tree and plucked up a stick lying beside it. I tossed it as hard as I could into the murky depths of the mist in front of me.

The spider reacted the way I hoped it would, changing its course abruptly and skittering soundlessly in the opposite direction, vanishing into the fog. I quickly ascended back up the tree to return to work on helping the cat.

I had come very close to getting the cat free when the spider came back, a scuttling mass of white returning to the centre of the web. It had a huge, silken wrapped bundle hanging from its jaws.

Within another minute I had finished freeing the cat. But as I tried to climb down the tree I got a little bit too impatient, unsettled and distracted by the sight of the spider’s return. I lost my balance momentarily, barely stopping myself from falling forwards straight into a section of web caked ground. I shrieked in surprise, the noise uncomfortably loud in the otherwise silent night. One of my legs had gotten completely stuck in an isolated section of the web, I realized as I glanced down.

I pulled my leg free with a painful, adrenalin filled yank, leaving my shoe half hanging in the web. I nearly fell out of the tree, landing in a tangled, sprawling heap on top of its roots. I could hear my new companion yowling as I scrambled to get up. Luckily it appeared the cat was alright; I could see it looking back at me from a small distance away up ahead on the road.

I turned toward the spider. It took me no time at all to understand how much trouble I was in. The creature was in the middle of crawling sideways along the roofs of houses and the sides of shop fronts. It was large enough it could use its long legs to close the gaps between one building and the next. Despite still being some distance away, the thing was closing in on me frightening quickly.

I broke out into a hard sprint through the street back the way I had come. The cat stopped every now and again to look behind with wide, gleaming eyes as if urging me to catch up. Running wasn’t going to be enough to save me. The one time I glanced back suggested how long I would be able to stay ahead of my pursuer.

The cat jumped up and nipped at my fingers, drawing my attention. Then it bounded up to the front of a nearby house with a small, sloping backyard. When I figured out what it wanted from me, I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it myself earlier.

I caught up with the feline, sprinting over to the door in a couple of steps, nearly tripping over myself in the process.

Luckily for me, most houses aren’t locked in the Otherworld. Theoretically, I could wander into any house I wanted. I preferred not to, because that felt like a pretty big invasion of privacy – but I had tried it a couple times out of curiosity.

I ran inside and slammed the door, panting wildly. I was standing in a dim hallway decorated with patterned, slightly old fashioned wallpaper. A pair of nearby doors stood opposite one another, each hanging open to reveal colourful, curtained rooms adorned with toys, drawers and beds covered by spaceship and planet adorned blankets.

I paused to lock the front door, then ran over to the nearest window to peer out into the darkness. When I didn’t see the spider, I checked another window, and then another.

Was it searching for a way inside the house? I wondered. With its size, I couldn’t imagine it could fit itself in, even if it managed to somehow break the door down.

I couldn’t see the spider. However, the horrors weren’t over yet.

The ability to astrally project isn’t the only power I possess while I’m inside Otherworld. I developed some even more disturbing abilities during my time here.

For instance, I know how to move into the minds of creatures and sometimes even more human inhabitants of the Otherworld. It’s as if I can psychically invade their thoughts, though sometimes they are the ones invading mine. Like astral projection, the power was (is) far from easy to control.

I began to feel like the spider was right beside me, a squirming, insectile mass probing at the edges of my mind. Here and there a half comprehensible thought or feeling briefly manifested at the fringes of my consciousness.

This quickly turned maddening. My awareness was split between two people. One was me, and the other was an unspeakable being, consumed by a deep, primordial hunger and a sense of predatory desire. With the invasive consciousness came recollections of eating and chewing ferociously on tough flesh and brittle bone, tasting things so foul they left me retching uncontrollably, alongside memories of hours being spent stalking and collecting prey.

I discovered a spot to curl up in the corner of one of the bedrooms, near a window that looked out on the web coated neighbourhood. Periodically, I heard the shifts and groans on the roof or skittering and pattering across the walls that told me the spider was still trying to seek me out. In my mind, the sense of hunger became aggravated by a growing feeling of impatience and frustration.

At least I was managing to keep my own presence hidden from it. It knew I was in its head, though not where, and its mind was perhaps the largest mind I’d ever sensed. Though that fact could change in seconds with a single short lapse in my focus.

The one thing which got me through the mental anguish of those minutes was the cat. A soft and warm bundle of fur climbed up onto my knees and pawed at my face for attention until I opened my eyes and began stroking him and alternately scratching him behind the ears.

We would survive the night together, one way or another. I just prayed we could both get out of there in one piece.

Extracting myself out of the spider’s mind was like getting the cat out of the web. Slow and painstakingly difficult yet manageable. The spider’s mind was immense but lacking in the speed and grace of its body, and the cat helped keep me calm enough to focus.

I created an imaginary room for myself the way my mom taught me and locked myself inside of it, away from the spider’s probing mind. The longer we spent separated, the further off its presence felt, and soon enough, it was difficult for me to sense its mind at all.

I didn’t hear or feel any sign of the spider after that. But every now and again I saw the cat’s ears pick up and he gave a low hiss, which was enough to let me know it wasn’t safe to go outside. I may have managed to protect my mind from its invasive psychic presence, but that didn’t mean it had physically gone anywhere.

There was only one way I was going to escape the situation alive. Dying in the Otherworld wouldn’t kill me in real life. Rather, I’d learned by then it could lead to something worse than death.

Once I felt like I’d relaxed enough I crawled under the queen sized bed inside of the room I’d snuck into, shuffled as far toward the back as I could, and closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like sleeping, but I knew I had to try. It was the only way out there. Sleeping (or sinking into a meditative trance) is how you enter the otherworld, and it’s also how you leave it.

I figured I would eventually fall asleep if I lay there for long enough. At least, I had to hope so. Every little noise jolted my eyes wide open and broke my heart out into a panicked, fluttering rhythm. I felt too vulnerable and exposed to relax. I was too restless, and found myself on my feet again after a couple more minutes of hiding.

I discovered the basement by accident whilst pacing the house to try to walk off my excess energy. It seemed like a better place to stay since it put a little more distance between me and the spider, so I migrated there, curling up against a dresser with my feet pulled up to my knees, cushioned by an old, scratchy blanket I discovered nearby.

The cat came over to me and cuddled up beside me. I felt his fur against my face, brushing my cheek and nose, and I heard his purring against my ear.

I pulled him close to myself, so that I could feel the vibrations of his breathing against my chest.

I can’t say how long it took me to get to sleep, but I did. From there I drifted back into normal dreams which quickly faded from my memory, and finally, I woke up (for real, this time). Back in the safety of my house and my normal bedroom, my session of astral projecting was over. The next time three nights later when I woke up again in the Otherworld, I looked around half hoping to see the cat curled up beside me where he’d been when I went to sleep inside the basement. When I realized I was alone, I wanted to cry. I very nearly did.

My short lived feline friend had been great, but it also served to remind me exactly how alone I was in this cold, dead world.

I sat on my bed for a while, despondent. Eventually, I wandered downstairs to face the quiet, gentle glow of a non-existent sun. It was daytime in the otherworld – though daytime looked like a perpetual sunset, so it was still gloomy. The cat practically scared me to death when he pounced on me ten minutes later as I was meandering listlessly along the footpath outside my house. I gave a shriek as something leapt into my arms, nearly knocking me off my feet. I struggled to get a hold of it but it was too fast and nimble, and it kept slipping free from my grip. Then I started laughing as it smothered my face in warm, rough licks. I felt soft fur against my hands and a fluffy tail tickling my hair and shoulders.

I carefully pulled the cat away from my face and stared into its mismatched eyes.

‘You found me,’ I said, wonderingly.

The cat blinked and licked its lips, then gave a long and lingering mew.

From that day on, the cat was my loyal friend; a friend who followed me – or had me follow him, during my night time trips through the Otherworld. Not all the trips admittedly; sometimes he would disappear on other adventures without me, but enough of them.

For the first time ever, in this lonely liminal world, I had a friend. He was a reminder that things weren’t all so awful around here.

Having someone there beside you, even if it is a mysterious spirit cat, is a lot better than wandering the alien landscapes alone. Even when you’ve gotten used to being alone for so long like I had, the quiet companionship of the cat made the Otherworld seem almost like a different place entirely.

‘What should I call you?’ I asked as I looked down at the cat contemplatively. In the days following my last visit to the Otherworld, a little googling had allowed me to identify the breed of the cat as a Khao Manee. It was a pretty good match except for the unusually large paws, ears, and eyes – and as I would later come to find, my cat’s tendency to float in the air sometimes. The creature stared up at me unblinkingly, offering absolutely no suggestions.

I tried out a couple of names. Charlie. Ash. Nugget. Sage. Larry. Caspian. Windsor. Solomon. None of them seemed right for him.

More names popped up in my mind. I dismissed each one of them as quickly as the first. One of my friends once had a cat named Snowflake, and that had me thinking up more random and unusual ideas.

‘Bubbles?’ I asked. I remembered always wanting to have a fish named Bubbles when I was younger, but my aunt and uncle were never fond of pets.

The cat winked.

‘Bubbles?’ I repeated the word a couple of times. It wasn’t any sensible name for any cat really, but I liked it anyway. Though I honestly couldn’t tell if the cat did.

‘Well, why not?’ I asked. I felt like it kinda suited him.

Bubbles responded by bounding a couple steps ahead of me and glancing behind him with wide eyes. The implication was clear.

That night, we set off on the first of countless journeys out into the depths of the Otherworld.

The next few hours I spent following my newly named cat through different parts of the Otherworld to whatever places Bubbles deemed worthy of my attention. Whenever I got tired, he meowed and pawed at me to keep following him.

That was one of Bubble’s favourite things to do with me; to show me things or places and observe my reaction to them. One time some weeks after our first meeting, he had me following him for more than an hour so he could retrieve a small bowl of yarn. Once we’d reached it, he awkwardly picked it up in his mouth and walked it over to me. Then he stared up at me until I took it from him with a sigh.

Bubbles wanted me to play with him. He’d actually made me walk for over an hour through nowhere just for this freaking ball of yarn.

I never knew if he was going to take me to see something insignificant and stupid or something strange and beautiful. A different time he took me to a garden filled with just about every kind of rose and flower I could imagine arranged chaotically alongside a long pathway reaching up to a cluttered, overgrown hoarder’s house.

He proceeded to run through the flowers, tearing up pieces of the garden and getting himself totally covered in dirt, flower petals and grass.

Another time the cat took me on a journey with him to a mossy, old looking house with hundreds of wind chimes and various charms hanging off of strings from every possible surface. They were playing a soft, slightly sad melody alongside the gentle breeze brushing against my face.

Standing on the porch and all over the garden were about as many miniature faerie statues and garden gnomes. An overgrown looking water fountain sat in the middle of it all, covered in moss and lilies.

I could swear I saw the gnomes moving out of the periphery of my vision. It was one of those uncanny places I was sure didn’t exist in the real world, rather randomly turning up in the Otherworld the same way the spiderweb had.

I’d tried to open the large, oaken door and was disappointed to find it was locked. It was unusual, because like I said earlier, doors to houses in the Otherworld tended to be unlocked most of the time.

Instead I tried using the large, decorated knocker to bang on the door a couple of times and apprehensively awaited a response. I thought I heard some feminine whispers and possibly a giggle coming from the other side, but no one ever answered the door and the quiet quickly returned.

Occasionally, I shared with Bubbles things I’d found, too, though they were usually not noteworthy, and to be honest, Bubbles rarely seemed interested unless I’d found him something to play with or chase around.

After a long night of exploring, we would sit together for a while staring out at the desolate city. We both had our favourite positions up on a large oak tree in my backyard. Bubbles perched himself delicately on a thin, horizontal branch and I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest on one of the tree’s larger limbs, leaning against the trunk, right above the swing I’d once built off of it when I was younger.

In many ways Bubbles acted like any regular cat would. He brought me ‘presents’ in the form of the carcasses of some small creatures, including fish, mice, and insects. Some species were familiar to me, others I’d never seen before. At least a couple of them looked quite terrifying.

He would also play small pranks on me. Not infrequently he would sneak up on me and pounce on top of me, biting me or turbo-slapping me with his paws before jumping off of me. He’d scared me half to death more than once this way.

There were also some un cat-like behaviours I noticed from Bubbles. He yowled and caterwauled at the moon for hours, mimicking the noises of what sounded like wolves in the distance. Sometimes they would join in alongside him instead. It left me to wonder if there were more creatures like Bubbles out there.

There were times where Bubbles acted far more intelligently than any cat should. For instance, he possessed an uncanny ability to find me whenever I was feeling miserable or sad, and I could swear he understood a lot of what I said to him during our one sided conversations. Bubbles was a very special cat, there was no denying it.

Whoever he was, I loved him. He was the perfect companion for my lonely night-time journeys.

Things in the dreamscape were very different with the cat around – though I had no way of knowing how much Bubbles would go on to change my life over the course of the following years.