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What you are describing sounds very much like a classic case of sleep paralysis and waking dreaming: “I was dead tired after a long shift at work and went to bed early. I get a phone call from my roommate and he says something about being so sorry for what he let into the house. I was groggy and I guess he just hung up and I go back to sleep. I’m asleep but in that kinda half about to wake up phase and I hear like wings hovering and flapping. Then I feel something grab my neck - then the thought is like F... there’s something on me and I jump up.”

The next two days the feral cats in the neighborhood were totally freaked and I’d come home and there would be like 10 or 12 of them spread out weird formation in the front yard staring at the house and the hair on my neck would stand up as I approached.

And if you had not had a waking dream shortly before that, one that had totally freaked you out especially after finding out your roommate was sota weird (and I’m thinking you had already figured that out by then), would you have even taken much notice of all the feral male cats that had probably been stalking the fertile female feral cat or cats that probably had been doing so for days and weeks before then?

When I lived in Baltimore, my house was near a big wooded area and there was a lot of wild life; not only many feral cats but also foxes and rabbits, possums and hawks and doves and salamanders and box turtles, garden snakes and lots of squirrels.

I used to sometimes hear the most dreadful, almost human sounding screams in the middle of the night, so loud, that sometimes it would wake me from a sound sleep. It was usually the sound of a fox getting a rabbit (the sound of a rabbit screaming is very disturbing) or a fox getting a hold and killing a possum or a feral cat or a male feral cat just banging a female feral cat. And during mating season, the feral cats in my neighborhood, well let me just say, they “partied and tried to hook up all night long”. Whatever was going on, it didn’t sound good.

And when the squirrels invaded my attic, the thumping and bumping and the scampering and the weird loud screeching sounds emanating in my ceiling above my bed and in my walls, it would have sounded a lot like demons if I was predisposed to believing in such had not figured out that they were actually squirrels and that I needed to call and exterminator and not an exorcist.