I had begun to lose all interest in the lives of people outside of my own head. Soon, I could go a number of days without seeing another soul and be kept away from the flat darkness of depression with only a few short hours of interaction with some acquaintance, or by sitting and observing people within a crowd for an afternoon. The lives of those in the books that I read gave me most of the social sustenance that I required as a human being. But even that necessity was fading.
As this happened my animals, a dog and a cat, began to take on depths to their personalities that I had never seen before. It is obvious when a dog is sad or angry. Cats are more subtle than dogs for the most part but their moods become clear enough when their behavior is understood. But now, my animals began to exhibit, or more precisely, I began to see, other moods that had once been hidden to me, as if a lack of human interaction allowed me higher reserves of social acuity that then discerned the more intricate emotions of creatures outside of my direct biological tree.
I noticed one afternoon that as my cat was cleaning herself, she took a moment to stop her cleaning and gazed down at her paw, as if she had become lost in thought, daydreaming about the future or perhaps remembering the past. A small noise escaped her and with a sort of blink in my mind I realized that she was feeling nostalgic for something. Perhaps it was the taste of her fur as she was cleaning, or the way it felt to run her paw over her stomach or hind leg, perhaps she was even feeling sad for some way that I used to treat her, better than she perceives I treat her today. She then lifted her head to gaze at me carelessly but sharp for a few moments and resumed cleaning herself again. I sat awake that night troubled by this, laying in the darkness and wondering over if felines even have a sense of self, and if they have the mental capacity to remember specific events and from there allow the melancholy fog of nostalgia to envelop that memory. And if my cat can feel nostalgia, does that mean that all cats in some way feel nostalgic about something? Is the world full of melancholy lions and lynx's, laying awake at night as i was then, drifting without focus in the thought of happy times spent with a now scorned lover? It seemed absurd to me at the time although now I am quite sure that they do, and that these feelings and thoughts are not reserved only for homo sapiens and felines.
I began to closely watch how my animals feel to try and discover what they were thinking about. My dog would pad over next to me and lay down, look at me shortly and then begin, I believe, to daydream. After a moments thought it seems obvious that animals daydream as they sit around in a room with no movement or change. They have a brain, and can exhibit simple emotions even to those who have not tuned themselves to notice anything more subtle, and they dream while they sleep which is obvious to anyone who has woken up to the sound of their animals incoherent growling as they lay asleep in the dark. But what exactly do they day dream about? Pose this question to most people and they will say respond, food, sex, chasing and fighting, and chuckle to themselves about the simplicity of it. But what sort of answer would a human give to what they are daydreaming about? I posit that it will be much the same thing, only including what we believe to be the man made invention of language and dialogue. Yes, in daydreams people often reminisce on past conversations and arguments, thinking about other ways it could have gone, things one could have or should have said differently that may have lead to a better outcome. A person who recently left a person they loved will roll situations around in their mind where some action taken could have prevented the loss of their lover. A young man, angered and made to feel small by his father will constantly imagine situations in which he is the one who has the upper hand, where he can make his father feel as small as the young man himself feels. A hungry or horny person will of course think about eating or copulating. And these things are only separate (we believe) from the daydreams of animals because our daydreams involve language, and theirs do not.
But this is not true.