Can cats protect you while you sleep?

It is certainly possible that cats can protect their owner while they sleep. It must depend upon a number of circumstances. There is a nice story on the Quora.com website about a cat who started yelling loudly because it seems that there was an intruder outside the window. This woke up her owner. 

Can cats protect you while you sleep? Yes, in their own way by pinning down the burglar until you wake up!

Her cat jumped from her bed onto a chair by the window and then started screaming loudly. When the shadowy intruder disappeared perhaps because of the yowling feline, she jumped back on her owner's bed and head-butted her as if to say "look what I did". And as an act of friendship, a bonding act after the end of that dangerous moment.

If you are snoozing on your bed and your cat is by your side or on your legs and they suddenly move and look out the window with their ears pricked forward, it's quite likely that there is something out there which has caught their attention. You might not have heard anything but your cat has because of superior hearing. This is a potential warning.

This sometimes happens to me. When my cat does this I have to get up to investigate or I watch out for a while to see if something develops before snoozing again. Sometimes it might be an animal like a badger which arouses my cat's attention. But the point here is that a cat has better hearing and therefore they can pick up stuff that humans can't.

But if you are in deep sleep, in the middle of the night, and your cat is on the bed with you but gets up when they hear something you clearly won't notice it. If they make a lot of fuss as happened for the woman I've mentioned they will wake you up and provide you with a warning mechanism.

There is another cute story which deserves to be repeated. The cat's owner was very sick with food poisoning. She says that she could barely move her head. One of her cats kept her paw on her shoulder and would not move from her side. She believes that her cat was protecting her during the time that she was in a weakened state. 

This is because her cat was in a position that she did not normally take up. She behaved differently. And she hissed at people who came over to her who she didn't know such as the apartment manager. It is quite plausible that domestic cats can be protective of their human caregiver when they feel that their human caregiver is in a vulnerable state.

Finally, there is an amusing story from a guy who said that his cream Persian cat protected him from his wife. His cat always slept against his legs at night. One evening his wife sat on the edge of the bed to say good night. She "playfully hit me on the shoulder". His cat, Cleo, immediately got up and positioned herself in between him and his wife and pushed his wife's hand away. He was fascinated with this so he asked his wife to do the same thing again. Once again Cleo intervened and pushed her hand away and then wanted to be petted. He said: "I wasn't protecting Cleo, she was protecting me".