Cat

Cat appears not as an encountered animal or a character with an independent life, but as a test case for how consciousness can present something as an image without positing it as real. In a hypnagogic vision, the subject may see a nonexistent cat: the creature seems present, yet the experience retains a trace of awareness that the vision is being produced by consciousness. That tension places Cat between freely playful imagery and the fully immersive object of a dream.

Status as an Imagined Creature

Cat’s significance lies in the way it is seen, not in any described animal behavior. In the hypnagogic state, consciousness does not posit an existing animal; more precisely, it sees a representation of a cat, or is in the act of seeing a nonexistent cat. Cat therefore names an imagined object whose apparent presence does not amount to the presence of a living creature in the surrounding world.

This example makes the distinction between image and reality concrete. The vision is not simply a cat mistaken for a real one: its mode of appearing already involves nonexistence. The creature is present to consciousness as an image, while the consciousness that apprehends it does not affirm that it exists.

From Visual Patterns to Vision

Hypnagogic imagery resembles the experience of finding forms in a spot or flame. In both cases the visual material is plastic: arabesques, faint forms, or contourless lights can be organized into apparent figures. A relaxed gaze may follow the patterns on a wall tapestry; certain groupings seize attention while the rest of the visual field remains vague and shifting. Faces may then appear, with fever sometimes giving them a quasi-hallucinatory clarity.

Yet the two experiences differ in how the figure is understood. When a person playfully finds an animal or face in arabesques, the pattern is not posited as really possessing the quality of representing that creature. The spontaneity of the activity remains conscious of itself. In hypnagogic vision, by contrast, that playful awareness has receded: the subject sees not merely a pattern that could suggest a cat, but a representation of a cat. The image is not posited as an existing animal, even as it takes on the character of a vision.

The Vision’s Uneasy Spontaneity

The hypnagogic subject retains a vague sense of spontaneity and indulgence toward the vision, including a feeling that it could be stopped at will. This awareness conflicts with the way the image is presented: consciousness behaves as though it were seeing something, while also sensing that it is at the origin of what appears. Because it feels itself imperfectly bound to the vision, it does not posit the cat as existent. Sartre captures the resulting paradox in the words, “I really see something, but what I see is nothing.”

The cat’s nonexistence is thus tied to the divided character of the experience. Consciousness has not simply abandoned itself to the vision, but neither does it treat the image as a freely invented figure in a pattern. Its incomplete captivity gives the cat an image-like status: it appears, but does not achieve the full standing of an object in the real world.

Dream and Engraving as Contrasts

A dream marks the more complete form of captivity. There, consciousness is wholly caught up in the vision, and the cat is posited as an object. The contrast clarifies why the hypnagogic cat is neither simply a dreamed animal nor an ordinary object of perception: the subject sees it as a representation while retaining some sense of the consciousness that produces the vision.

Sartre also compares this mode of positing to seeing Death in Dürer’s engraving: one sees the figure, yet does not take the depicted being to exist. The comparison also marks a difference between the two cases. An engraving has material that retains its independence and can still be perceived as an object; its image can be connected to a support that remains available to perception. In hypnagogic consciousness, the image is almost inseparable from the consciousness apprehending it, which radically transforms the role and constitution of its intuitive support. When that imaging consciousness disintegrates, the perceptual elements that served as its matter are difficult to recover. Cat’s brief philosophical role therefore exposes a boundary between seeing a nonexistent creature and perceiving a real one.