The Captain’s Log entry: Weeks of 17 June through 7 July, the year of our Lord 2025
A cat at rest is truly living the dream!
Hello again!
Yay! Our first two episodes of this season dropped, inspired by catnaps! How’d you like them?
In the interim, we’ve had at least 7 sleep cycles, or more if you’re counting cat naps.
Since adopting Peanut, I - Captain Kitty, or Amanda if you’re self-serious - have started looking forward to bedtime, mainly because SHE loves bedtime. Unlike Binky and Snuggles - who prefer to roam around the apartment in between catnaps - at about 11pm ET, Peanut starts getting restless. I know it’s then time to do the Peanut Bedtime song and let her lead me into the bedroom. She’ll do her little zoomie for a few minutes, then settle between my knees into near-instant slumber. It’s very inspiring. And apropos of the episodes we just dropped -
AT OUR LAST PORT OF DISEMBARKATION
In which the editorial director of this newsletter, Captain Kitty reports on our past destinations.
So about sleep.
I’m a big catnapper. I love my siestas. But when it comes to sleeping at night (as is most socially acceptable, proscribed and expected), it’s a bit variable.
Since moving into my (erm, sleepier - HMU) consultant phase, I’ve been snoozing WAY better. But still - the early phase of sleep in which the body slows up and cools down, well.
Sometimes, I’m able to pass into Hypnos’ domain within minutes of my head hitting my water pillow (which solved a neck pain issue - I recommend). I don’t have a kid, I’m not pregnant and I am fortunate to have no known health conditions beyond an overactive bladder (#TMI sorry) that would prevent me from a reasonable descent into dreamland.
But usually, it takes me up to an hour to really get the nods. During that time, in addition to having Peanut tuck us in, I engage in a few other things that I guess count as rituals:
Social media. (On Dark Mode, on my phone). Yes, I know this is bad. Thankfully, most of my feeds are of cute cats with ambient music akin to a baby’s lullaby. Or cooking videos. Anything process oriented is systemic and verges on boring. Again, yes I know this is bad. But in terms of screens before bedtime, this is lower on the level of “This is still very bad for you.” I do that for up to an hour, then…
I open PocketCasts, set the volume to low so as not to disturb my human and feline bedfellows, and queue up my favorite true scary / paranormal story podcasts. (Or a discussion or narrated podcast that - VERY IMPORTANT - has primarily calm, steady speakers.) The critical element is the voice element. No shouty, funny, angry or animated talks. I’m talking middle or longform episodes with NPR, “Delicious Dish”, natural(istic) recitations or narration. (This…does influence my dreams sometimes, but I don’t listen to ones with violence, just supernatural scary stuff.) It may sound weird but it’s actually kind of common. And why not? There’s something disorienting but also sort of…satisfying about waking up hours later and realizing that (a) the podcast episode is over, I don’t remember how it ended so therefore (b) I slept for at least that length of time.
On a side note, this “unwind to audio” ritual isn’t new to me - as a restless teen, there were no podcasts. But I was lucky enough to have grown up during a time of the great New Age soundtrack infomercial. (And trip hop and shoegaze, but that’s another story). Chief among these chanting Gregorian monks; Celtic harps and earnest harmonies courtesy Clannad; the vaguely softcore porn sounding Enigma; and other ambient producers was my beloved - the world’s #1 Irish Cat Lady and sister of Clannad’s lead singer - one Eithne Pádraigín of clan Bhraonáin - or Enya Brennan in the colonizer language. Enya’s first four albums, especially Shepherd Moons, provided my adolescent sleep soundtrack which had a good run (…until one unpleasant evening when I woke up in the middle of that intense moment during her most metal track, Cursum Perficio which was inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s headstone. Appropriately, it means “Here is where my journey ends”.)
I no longer have the Panasonic CD player with 15 seconds of anti-skip technology and the headphones that got stuck in my hair. But I still rock with Enya. My version of her epic tune Orinoco Flow entertains many a surprised karaoke audience. And if anyone has the party line to her publicist, I’d love to interview here.
I digress.
So, sleep. Rest. You know - you could say that sleep or rest factored into Season 3 in general. Between our season 2 finale and the launch of season 3 was a period of over 12 months. I had originally tried to speed it up an release by Fall 2024, but the vibes were NOT right. Yours truly and the crew went through a LOT of changes - including of course the adoption and adjustment that came with our surprise 3rd baby, Lil’ Miss Nutty Pea. As well as health, career and interpersonal changes.
The rest period was necessary. And in combination with the current state of the world - this is why we - yours truly, and my executive producer team Binky, Snuggles and Peanut of course - decided to launch season 3 with this two-episode arc on rest and dreams.
A body at rest - what does THAT look like? Well - as y’all may recall, in our Season 1 episode on science, we investigated the rheology of cats - that is, if they are indeed liquid. And this kind of led to the discussion we had with Pilates legend Mary Bowen - the most senior active Pilates instructor to have studied directly under Joseph and Clara Pilates themselves. Who, of course, is a cat lover herself. I was lucky to have been connected to Mary through a client of mine, Dianna Scotece - founder of a wonderful non-profit called Muscle Inspires New Empowerment - MINE - that connects intimate partner violence, or domestic violence (IPV) survivors to a trauma-informed fitness professional who coaches them through a 9-week power lifting program. (They happen to be recruiting for their Fall 2025 cohort, which launches in September. If you know someone in the NYC area who has survived IPV and might be interested, feel free to share this link with them!)
Mary was an absolutely wonderful person to interview about a body at ease and rest. It was fun to hear that some of you learned that the technique was named after a person thanks to this episode! (Which makes sense. It’s not like you run into a bunch of people with that surname. A quick glance at Ancestry.com via Google search yields a whopping 19 census records and one sole Pilates in the United States who lives in…Iowa?)
Anyway. Beyond validating my lifelong appreciation of cat naps, I hope y’all got out of this an better understanding how critical it is to have a direct and innate connection to your body. The human brain developed in such a way that - while introducing sophisticated capacities for generativity, altruism and self-awareness (well, for some of us!) - we are also further removed from our “gut instinct” - our felt needs and urges. I think a lot of that inner conflict is what contributes to our restlessness.
This is what brought us to our second expert, author of New York Times Bestseller Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and Bishop of Naps Tricia Hersey, M.Div.
Tricia is well known for leading The Nap Ministry, a movement to demand rest as a human right and a tool of resistance against every force in this world that separates us from ourselves and others. What I truly appreciate about Tricia’s approach is how she directly addresses the capitalist hijacking of “self-care” - a principle most eloquently summarized by queer Black feminist poet and philosopher Audre Lorde - and the spirituality she infuses into the fact that rest is a divine mandate.
Bishop Hersey is in demand, for obvious reasons - but thanks to her love of cats (specifically Thor, her handsome Prince of Peaceful Sleep!) my humble invitation resonated with her and I had the privilege of enjoying a wonderful long discussion about all things rest - and cats! In fact, here is a snap of Thor that Tricia kindly allowed me to share with you all! May Thor be added to the line-up of Sleep Mascot Pin-ups if you will.
In part one, we explored the science of sleep in humans and cats a bit - and how rest is a cornerstone of any sustainable prosocial action plan.
In part two, we focused on The Dreamspace - coined thusly as a dedicated mental, spiritual - and in The Nap Ministry’s case - physical space where the power of dreaming is not only allowed, but centralized.
So we looked more closely into the content and mechanism of the art and act of dreaming - both for humans AND cats.
Dreams are definitely a canary in the coal mine, if you will, for certain neurological disorders. I recall from my days working in aging and dementia research that vivid, realistic nightmares were a hallmark of one form of dementia - Lewy Body - and was sad to have heard of a relative’s decline which included experiencing scary dreams that felt so real, that he would go to the window at night and look out for the intruders in his nightmares. And mood disorders like depression and anxiety have correlations with the frequency and vividness of dreams as well. The branches and schools of psychology that focus on interpersonal relationships - especially psychodynamic theory, popularized by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who we discussed in this episode - specifically examine the contents of dreams to excavate and examine the dreamer’s conflicts in waking life of past and present.
So it’s about time that the world of brain research is taking dreams seriously and no longer seems to see them as mental “junk” that is being cleared out.
Cat dreams have yet to be examined because, as we have mentioned pretty much throughout this entire podcast, there remains a dearth of cat-focused research. A lot of what we know about cat brains is a byproduct of experimentation for the sake of human advancement - which is slowing down thanks to bills like these, among the few uncontroversially good bipartisan acts that #45 (and unfortunately and horrifically, #47 now) signed into U.S. law - and of course, we can’t really sit cats down and ask them about their dreams. But if you listened to the episode you can get a sense of what some philosophers like David Peña-Guzmán speculate may be involved.
As for dreaming about cats - believe it or not, they aren’t 100% of what I dream about - I was delighted to have also consulted with Mary Bowen for her expertise in Jungian analysis. I studied psychology in university and while my focus was on developmental psychology - I had originally aimed for a career in research, which sort of worked out since I do a heck ton of literature reviews and writing for this podcast - I still remember thinking Carl Jung was onto something. And if I make enough $ on this podcast, perhaps I can work with Mary as one of her clients.
Jung’s work drew on the multiple ancient and contemporary texts and practices of a diverse roster of communities and cultures. Dreams and dreamwork are an ancient aspect of healing and spirituality.
But in these so-called advanced, modern times, dreaming is almost an afterthought. And we see the cost of this ignorance of dreams daily.
During my years of corrupting educating and supporting the youth, one of the consistent ways that I, the totally cool, absolutely not irrelevant adult in their lives tried to connect to them was by asking them open-ended, “fun” questions, like “What is your dream for your future?”
Hot tip: Don’t ask someone going through a hard time such a difficult question.
Eventually, a few of them humored me and told me that they didn’t know because…they just didn’t have a dream. They didn’t have TIME to dream. They didn’t know exactly how to dream. Or even why they needed to dream.
I quickly changed the subject and reverted to quizzing them on their favorite animal and why any answer but cat is the wrong one. Then we went back to the lesson.
Ahem.
There’s something really, really sad about the way those of us raised in these modern industrialized times were raised to punish ourselves for doing anything that didn’t have a measurable, visible “purpose”. Quotes like “Idle hands make the devil’s work” and “The early bird gets the worm” and all manner of metaphors and quotes that integrate the military, machines or sports make it sound like humans are meant to be meat robots.
Purpose, intentional action and meaningful interpersonal and social roles are important. But I think this is a spectrum. And we are so, so far into the extreme - in a cult of prosperity gospel and worship of the 1% who are grinding and churning this entire planet into a bloody pulp - that Tricia’s message, one that continues the thoughts of folks like MLK, Jr., Fannie Lou Harris, The Dalai Llama - heck, Cicero (but probably not Plato) is nothing short of life-saving.
“Only the person who learns to relax is able to create, and for them, ideas reach the mind like lightning.” – Cicero
Producing each episode requires repeatedly listening to the words of my experts and it was very therapeutic, actually, to have heard Tricia and Mary in my ears for 20 hours, ha! So, folks. Does the richest man in the world sleep as well as a beloved Cairo street cat who belongs to a quiet neighborhood? A snoozing pigeon atop the awning of a bakery? A worm? Who knows.
All I know that, of all things to judge people by - their net worth isn’t one of them. Not given how we know that money is earned. Perhaps it truly is how they sleep at night. And we hope you got whatever you needed out of this miniseries. Another big thank you to both Mary Bowen and Tricia Hersey for their wisdom and warmth throughout.
So, folks - you now know a lot about me. And I’m very curious about YOU!
What helps YOU sleep, does your cat sleep with you - and what are your most common dreams?
Answer me in the comments of this post, or just write me back! I love talking about this stuff. (And if you have a hot second, tell me more about yourself here!)
NEWS FROM THE CREW!
Here is where my team will share their updates.
🎸 Captain Kitty and her band will be playing a dreamy show at TV Eye on 7/26, if you’re in the NYC area, get your tickets now!
✈️ Stay tuned for some other COOL CAT STUFF in October that Captain Kitty is involved in!
and…
NEXT EPISODE DROPS TUESDAY 7/15! Mark your calendars and be prepared to hear an airtight case on why cats are cuter than babies with the help of two digital artists and a publisher.
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Ok folks. Hope you loved our two-part miniseries on Catnaps! If you loved it, mind submitting a review and giving us a 5-star rating?
And! Do tell us about what helps YOU sleep - and what you’ve been dreaming of, if not just about kitties! Until next Tuesday…
🛟 Stay whole, spread love, and remember - everything is connected. 🛟
Captain Kitty, Binky, Snuggles and Peanut