Recurring pet dreams

This is a dream that I used to have all the time when I was younger. It's far less common now, but still floats up occasionally. The dream itself always changes, but usually it takes place at home or outside our house in the yard. In the dream there are duplicates of all the pets, sometimes just one, sometimes dozens, some of them look very much alike, and some only a little. Like the black and white cat, some might be skinner than normal, or have different black markings, but some might look exactly identical. In the dream I'm trying to figure out which are the real ones, and I know many of the duplicates are evil. Some of the are obviously so, they even look evil, or will try to bite or scratch me, or hiss at me if I get too close. I'll usually start trying to weed out the evil ones looking for the real pet, but sometimes I have trouble telling the last few apart because some of the evil ones are trying to pretend to be the real pet. I've had this dream revolve around cats, dogs, rats, rabbits.. pretty much any pet I've had.

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One dream that was similar to this but not the usual I was waking up and checking the computer like usual, I was IMing a friend, but couldn't remember what about once I woke up, but my cat came in and I didn't think much of it but then realized my cat was asleep on the bed like usual, and something wasn't right about this one, she tried to jump onto the bed, but didn't quite quite make it, and the paws looked wrong to me, almost hand like with claws. They snagged on the sheet and the cat fell back to the floor pulling the sheet with it. The fake cat made me really uneasy, I didn't want to let on that I knew it wasn't supposed to be there so I went to my mothers room and tried to tell her, but she wasn't listening to me and didn't seem to care, so I left, and the fake cat started rubbing up against me and I tried to gently push it away, but it turned mean and attacked me, latched onto my hand and started tearing into it with it's teeth and claws. The more it tore up my hand, the more demonic and evil this cat looked, it didn't look furry anymore either, and was all black, kind of looked like a black cat that had mange and all it's hair fell out, and it's paws were clawed hands. I could feel them slicing into me, though there wasn't a lot of blood, just pain and fear of this thing.

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I'd like to say that I love my pets, I'm a very animal/pet oriented person, and I adore my cat. Also these dreams are never the animals themselves being evil, just duplicate evil animals, in the dreams they're distinctly not the real animal, just false animals trying to pass as the real one. If anyone could give any thoughts and translations to both dreams, the reoccurring one, and the evil cat one, I would appreciate it. I tend to dwell on my dreams a lot until I can work out meanings but these ones have me stumped.