This will come as no shock to anyone; cats sleep a lot. What’s more of an interest though, is where they sleep. 
In the picture above Spenny is trying to sleep in the laundry basket that contained a hitherto clean towel. Nice and soft and fluffy and warm. When he sleeps on our bed he will usually try to sleep on a section that has multiple layers of quilt under him. That’s only one class of places to sleep though – soft and warm.
The second class of places to sleep are the weird places. Things like lying with your neck bent 90° against a shelf support, or on a mattress, in the gap between things. In Spenny’s case under my desk to one side probably comes under this.
The third class of places is where things get really interesting though. Let’s call this “Places Where Humans Want To Be” I’m fairly certain I am not the only person to have noticed this, so that leaves the question; why? You would think it would be obvious they’re somewhere we want to be and about to get removed and/or chastised, and this would make one of the numerous other soft/warm/uncomfortable places they have to snooze more preferable.
The most common target for Spenny’s snooze-attack is my boyfriend’s chair. Let’s take this fairly typical conversation…
= boyfriend, in this case
= Spenny, still
– “Oi! That’s my chair!”
– Opens eyes and looks up, “is it?”
– “Are you going to move, Spenny?”
– Blinks, “move? What’s a move?”
– “Move.” Pointing arm.
– Folds paws under chin.
– “Fine.” Picks Spenny up and places him on the floor whilst he’s still curled up.
– “Mrrf.” 
The other way that plays out is my boyfriend sits down with Spenny still on the chair and shuffles backwards, leaving Spenny with a 6 inch wide triangular gap in which to look grumpy from the side. The record for tolerating this is about 30 seconds, before he squeezes out between boyfriend and armrest. Such an imposition, isn’t it Spenny?
Unfortunately, my boyfriend isn’t the only victim here. I don’t usually find Spenny on my chair, though, because he’s learned to associate the sound of my car being parked on the driveway with my arrival and impending food. On occasion, though, I come back, pull my chair out from under my desk, and find it is already occupied with a round Spenny.
= me again.
– “Hey, I’m pretty sure we’ve already had this conversation.”
– Looks innocent, blinks.
– “OK, so are we going to do this the hard way or the easy way?”
– Blinks again.
– “Hard way then, no problem.”
– Curls up, presumably expecting to be picked by me up like my boyfriend does.
At this point, my evil-bitch side comes out again.
Both Lum and myself have office style swivel chairs in the study. The solution is obvious. Swivel chairs go round, so does Spenny. Round and round, spinning gently, Spenny sits up slightly, watching the scenery of the room as it flies past. He seems a little confused – the room isn’t supposed to do that. I’ve been doing this for about 10 seconds now, and I’m starting to wonder if cats throw up when they get dizzy. 15 seconds, Spenny is starting to turn his head to watch things as they go past him, and I realise that if Spenny does throw up, it’s going to be distributed in a nice efficient pattern around the room at about knee height. 20 seconds, Spenny stands up and leaps off the rotating chair with a rather wobbly fashion and walks to the centre of the room where he sits down.
Ah-ha! I win. Spenny obviously holds an expression saying that he always intended to get off then, and stoically sits watching me, giving off the impression that being spun round had no bearing at all on him getting down. The next day I pull my chair out from under my desk, there’s a round cat there again. Spenny looks up at me. I look down at Spenny, tilt my head and raise an eyebrow. Spenny jumps down off the chair. My chair, Spenny.
The only other bone of contention regarding sleeping arrangements is my sheepskin rug. It always used to be the case that Spenny would avoid setting paw on it at all costs. If he wanted to get to the other side of it, he would walk all the way around and balance a narrow path just so he didn’t have to pass over it. At some point in the last four years, though, he realised that it is in fact the ultimate in warm and fluffy places to sleep. Which is a shame, because I rather like sitting on it. I did try to come to a compromise with Spenny and use him as a pillow, but he rejected the offer by extracting himself from under my head, turning around, and shaking his whole body whilst glaring at me with pure disdain. Pity, I always wanted a self-warming pillow in the winter months.
He seems unwilling or unable to learn not to sleep there though. For a time I started rolling him up in the rug and picking it up with Spenny’s head sticking out of one end and his tail sticking out of the other. This generally went down fairly poorly with Spenny, who jumped out before I could deposit him somewhere else. After a while he started leaving the rug as soon as I picked up a corner. Nowadays I’ll find him sitting next to the rug yawning and looking as innocent as can be, despite the tell-tale warm spot.
The theme, generally, is that if he is in a place where I want to be, he’ll give it up to me. My boyfriend isn’t so lucky though. To be honest I think Spenny is trying to usurp boyfriend from the number two spot and replace him. The ultimate in feline replacement is when I’m having a nap and my boyfriend comes home late. I’m in bed because I’m tired, and I’m woken by the sound of him coming in. As I open my eyes, I can see in the half light a black shape with two yellowy-green glowing eyes in the bed opposite me. No, my boyfriend hasn’t crawled into bed, it’s Spenny. To be precise, it’s Spenny lying on his side with his head on the pillow.
My boyfriend removes his pillow from the bed, letting Spenny’s head flop onto the mattress.
–
Spenny does that a lot. Whenever my boyfriend is away for work, I’ll usually find Spenny is taking up the whole of his side of the bed. Often I’ll find him copying the way one of us sleeps. He’ll never sleep under the quilt though. That’s a shame though, again, because I’d really prefer a warm cat to a hot water bottle! Boyfriend is not so certain.
Poor boyfriend.
