A cluttered room

My boyfriend D and I live in what in real life is my parents' house; in the dream it is our house or apartment. It is a Saturday. My bedroom and the living room are a chaotic mess; stuff is just everywhere. I say I am going to clean all this up today. My cat C perches on the rim of an empty litter pan and pees in it. I comment on how strange she looks, hanging her ass over the edge like that. I notice that this is not her normal litter pan. This is a bright orange, uncovered pan with no litter in it; her normal pan is grey, covered, and full of litter. [My parents' cat's litter pan in reality is bright orange with no cover.] I look around the messy bedroom and see her normal litter pan a few inches away. However, the room is so messy that the pan's entrance is not accessible to her. In the dream, I observe more than one instance of C "hanging her ass over the side" of an empty pan and peeing in it. The absence of litter makes the sound of her peeing rather distinct as well.

Among the many items covering the messy floor is a very large grey plastic uncovered box. It contains a jumbled assortment of items belonging to D-- an unfolded shirt, some keys, et cetera-- that he is going to be storing. C is perching on the edge of this box too, and then she steps right onto the surface of the water it is now filled with. Then I see the box is filled with a transparent gelatin that C is walking on. D's items are visible at the bottom of the box, now encased in gelatin. Apparently it is one of those boxes that comes with this powder that turns to gelatin when wet. [?? This seemed a perfectly common item in the dream.] I tell D that C must have peed in that box and activated the gelatin. D is annoyed that now he has to extricate all his things from the gelatin. However, it turns out to be easier than we thought to free the items; the gelatin is firm and peels away from D's things with no problem.

*****

I am slightly compulsive about tidiness. I insist on having everything in the apartment "just so," and D and I are constantly in conflict over this. In this dream our home is "littered" with out-of-place articles. The only place that doesn't contain litter is C's litter box! This is the opposite of "a place for everything and everything in its place." This dream shows my preoccupation with keeping a tidy home and my perception of D as an impediment in this regard. Perhaps I wish all his clutter were neatly "encased," as in a block of gelatin.

I'm sure there are hundreds of ways my subconscious could have represented this concept. The particular choice of C and her litter box probably is due to nothing more than her recently having had a medical procedure that required me to retain her used litter in a sealed container for several weeks before disposing of it. Just the other day I finally threw out all these weeks' worth of used litter, so cat litter was on my mind. Additionally, D's and my apartment is small enough that when it is quiet, you can clearly hear it when C pees. It is possible (though I have no way of confirming) that as I slept I actually did hear the sound of C peeing in her box just outside our bedroom.