I dreamt of the tortured cat last night. Several times I passed the Rocky Mountain News webpage the other day, glancing at the yourHub.com story link, refusing to go there. In the end, I did.

When I was nine, my grandmother brought me downtown on the bus. I was performing in a school program the next day and she treated me to a sausage-curl makeover at her favorite beauty shop. A disheveled man clutching a paper-bagged bottle collapsed in front of us on the sidewalk, his mouth and nose spurting blood. My grandmother clutched my arm, guiding me away, murmuring, "Don't look. Keep moving."

At first, I wondered why my grandmother, a loving and compassionate woman, did not stop to help. Turning my head against her instructions, I assumed that was the crowd's intent, quickly surrounding the man. Eventually, I understood my grandmother wanted to protect me from knowing that people died on the street, not drawing public interest until blood soaked their tattered bodies.

Such knowledge can be difficult reconciling with everyday existence. Where sociopaths torturing vulnerable creatures like cats and children thoughtlessly pass through light and darkness, seeing life outside their own as merely shadows, most observers swallow the darkness but cannot digest it, momentarily unable to find the counterpoint of light.

A few weeks ago an old friend phoned. A member of her family had been brutally murdered, beaten beyond recognition with a baseball bat. My friend's nephew was in custody. The local online newspaper report where the family requested remembrances was soaked with internet vitriol. All the ingredients were there, wrote anonymous visitors, alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse, poverty. "How could the family just watch this happen?" they asked, before the moderator humanely sewed up the thread.

Whether it happens before our eyes, in a book or movie, fictionalized or not, or television coverage of the latest unspeakable tragedy, something compels us to either watch or turn away, looking through our fingers, when the darkness surrounding us every day, ragged and shapeless, takes a form we recognize.

The tortured cat lived in my dream. Then my own cat, stirring at my side, woke me.