danceswithcats Cool song! I sang it in real time and everything.
Mousely Catmas to you as well 
The Cats are Schizophrenic.
The best term for it that I’ve seen is “seeing martians”. Sorry, I can’t remember the title of book that comes from.
The cats aren’t seeing anything.
They’re doing pretty much the same thing that they do when they play with a piece of string or a leaf. They’re pretending.
It’s obviously some hard-wired feature for cats. Most of them do it.
You can speculate about why they do it, and a pretty obvious speculation is that it has to do with prey catching: they’re practicing.
My cats are just dumb.
My cat chases non-existent things around the room. I agree with Desmostylus: it’s pretending.
Everyone here seems to be presuming that cats can see.
Of course, they can see, but do they see what you see? More importantly, can you see what they see? Do you see what I see?
Cats see what they want to see, just like the rest of us. Except for the times when they pretend to see something that isn’t there just for the fun of seeing the confusion it causes in humans with FVS, feline voyeur syndrome.
I had a pair of cats once. They would stare and meow at a corner of my living room for hours. To this day I have no clue what they were staring at or meowing at. It seriously freaked me out after a while because I had no clue what they were seeing. They would both follow whatever it was with their eyes in unison, but I could never see what they saw. Freaaaaky
I was regularily sitting in a chair reading, and noticed my cats staring & even jumping at the opposite blank wall. But I looked, and could see nothing there. Even when I put the book down, got up and went over to the wall.
Eventually I noticed that the sunlight from the window was being reflected off my gold watchband and onto the opposite wall, and that was what they were after. And, of course, as soon as I put the book down or moved out of the chair to look at the wall, the reflection went away.
So I have to wonder who’s the smartest being in this situation.
I like it when the cat will be sitting all quiet and comfortably in one room, SUDDENLY it’s ears perk up and it RUNS in to the next room at top speed. You go in that room and nothing is there.
I mean how does a cat decide not only does he have to be in another room but he must get there at the speed of light.
I’ve read that the chattering that some cats do when they see something they want to catch is anticipating the biting they are going to do when they catch it. It’s something a really good experience hunter has learned not to do, but it’s common in cats that don’t hunt for real.
As for the staring at nothing, I go with the fact that they have very sensitive hearing and are often reacting to something you can’t hear. Try moving your finger or an object under a towel or blanket. Often you don’t hear a thing, but the cat does.
I have four cats. One of them constantly looks in the mirror and cries. I’m thinking she has “some issues” with her appearance. I can’t figure it out past that. But she can sit and look at herself for HOURS and cry. I tell her she’s a “pretty baby”, but she doesn’t care what I think.
To get back to the OP (though some have been joking about this), I really DO think cats see ghosts. I also believe children see ghosts. I’m not sure when/why adults lose that ability (for the most part), though I can honestly say I’ve seen a few in my life. I still believe that it comes more frequently and easily to children and animals.
Animals “know shit”. I remember in April of 2001, I was sitting at my computer. All four cats got together from all different rooms in my apartment, and stood in my bedroom doorway. All in a perfect line. I stared at them for a good ten seconds trying to figure out what they were up to. But you can lose sleep on trying to figure cats out. So I went back to what I was doing.
At LEAST 20 seconds after I had returned to what I was doing, we had an earthquake. Not a very bad one. I think it was about a 5 (originating in upstate New York), though Montreal hardly ever gets earthquakes, so this was “big” for me.
I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there like an idiot holding my computer monitor. I looked to the cats to see if they were ok. OF COURSE they were ok. They knew AHEAD of time and for some reason, had an “emergency plan”.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they didn’t hide under the bed. In hindsight though, I think they all followed the “Alpha Male”, who makes it his job to protect me. From this vantage point, they could still see.
*** the idiot human who spends way too much time on that machine ***
:smack: