by Nicole Cook

Created on: February 13, 2009

Have you ever been woken up at three in the morning by feeling a heavy weight on your chest and that unmistakable feeling that you're being watched? You open your eyes to see your cat is sitting on your chest and he is watching you sleep. Its much too early to feed him, so what could he possibly want from you? How well do you know your cat? More specifically how well do you think you know your cat? The cats in our lives are constantly communicating with us or at least attempting to. It is up to us to try and decode these messages and understand what our cats are trying to tell us.

If you have found yourself in the situation described above, which as a cat owner you probably have on numerous occasions, you may be wondering what was going through your cats mind at the time. Our cats will wake us up in the middle of the night for a number of reasons; the most obvious of course is hunger. They don't care that their normal feeding time is not for another four or five hours, they expect their breakfast on their terms not yours. While a snack may be their only goal, many times the reason our cats wake us up in the middle of the night is simply boredom.

Cats are naturally nocturnal and will often stay up all night wandering about the house, staring out a window into the pitch-black night, or hunting invisible prey in your bedroom of all places. Wild cats use the night time as their hunting time and will often sleep most of the day if not all day only waking and becoming active once the sun has set. Though our cats are domesticated, they still have the natural urge to be active during the night. Unfortunately their schedule does not always mesh will with ours and we find ourselves on the receiving end the paw of a bored cat that wants your attention. Some cats eventually give up and let you sleep but there are those that can be pretty determined going as far as biting your nose or chin in order to wake you up.

Do you understand catspeak? How well can you read your cats body language and meows? While to some it seems as though a cat's vocabulary consists of the single word "meow", this is not completely true. The tone, volume, and duration of your cats cry can convey intricate messages to you. Short chirps can be understood as a simple "hello" while drawn out howls can convey anxiety or frustration. Closed mouth cries can simply be acknowledgements of your presence, or a response to you initiating a conversation. You may have heard this closed mouth cry when saying hello or calling your cat to come to you and it is often the equivalent to a human being simply saying, "huh?"

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