2. This book I'm reading (Dolores Cannon: Convoluted Universe part III) explains how various different animals see the world. Cats, apparently, see energy patterns before they see forms. We humans appear to them as a swirl of colours- and only afterwards as what we think of as our proper shapes. That's why they can "see" ghosts when we can't. It also explains why Marlowe doesn't seem to recognise me if we meet by chance outside- and is inclined to run away until I call to him or make a "Ch-ch" noise.
3. I was between wake and sleep and suddenly there was this woman standing right in front of me- face to face. It was an encounter but not a meeting, as if she saw what she expected to see- as if I was seeing her- or she was seeing me- in a mirror. She seemed like a real personality- and not just a generic dream-type person; put it this way, I'd know her if I saw her again. She had a broad, handsome, hardworked face- weathered and tired around the eyes. I couldn't see what she was wearing but I intuited some sort of simple dress or smock. Her hair was pulled back and, presumably, fastenened somehow round the back of her head. She looked Northern European, in her late twenties or early thirties and not of our present time frame. If you pushed me I say she was Scandanavian or possibly Russian and living around the year 1900.