Sued by a roofing company

Last night I dreamt -- almost entirely in Chinese, which is unusual for me -- that I received a phone call from a roofing company informing me that they were suing my school. The grounds for the lawsuit were as follows.

My family had owned a cat that was extremely aggressive and used to scratch and bite people viciously. (This cat was called Tri, the name of one of my past cats who in waking life was never aggressive.) We kept her for years, but in the end my mother got tired of our getting "torn to shreds" all the time, so we advertised to find a new home for her, making her behavioral issues clear in the ad. A woman who worked for the roofing company had responded to the ad, adopted the cat, and, predictably, ended up getting severely scratched. The scratch became infected and, by some freak chance, the woman died. She had been pregnant at the time, doubling the tragedy. This woman proved to be irreplaceable in her role at the roofing company, and without her the company was failing. The boss believed this had all been an intentional plot on the part of my school to sabotage his roofing company, which was why it was the company that was suing my school rather than the woman's family suing mine.

I said that I was very sorry to hear about their employee but that the lawsuit was ridiculous and would be thrown out of court. We had lived with the cat for years without any of us suffering anything worse than some nasty lacerations, so it was absurd to suggest that letting someone else adopt her amounted to a premeditated attempt on the new owner's life. Nor did we have the ability to somehow cause a particular intended victim to respond to our ad. Furthermore, a roofing company was in no way in competition with a language school, so there could be no conceivable corporate motive for the alleged sabotage.

After I hung up, I felt bad about having spent the whole call inveighing against a lawsuit that had zero chance of success anyway and having been so perfunctory in my expression of sympathy for what was after all a terrible human tragedy for which I was to some degree responsible.

Kind of a horrible dream, though not a nightmare in the conventional sense.

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After I woke, the combination of a roofing company and my school made me think of my October 2025 dream "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," in which a roofer shows up at my school. Before looking up the dream, I had forgotten that it involved my being addressed as Danny John Malkovich. In the very long comment thread on yesterday's post "Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)," I mentioned that in the dream documented there I had gone by the pseudonym Marvin Fenlingstone Starsky, and I had then tied this to my October 2021 dream "Gene Hackman," in which a boy named Danny changed into a boy named Marvin. I also note in "Clinkscales" that the Starsky character in the TV series "Starsky and Hutch" (of which I know nothing but the name) has a brother named Nicholas Marvin Starsky. In the "Gene Hackman" post, I note that John Malkovich had a brother called Danny.

The Danny John Malkovich dream, like the Total Racism Indicator dream, features Black people and has a "racist" element (including a use of the n-word). As Debbie has pointed out, this does seem to be a recurring theme in my dreams, which is odd given that I live in a country with essentially no Black people and rarely have occasion to think about that race in waking life.