Purr-Chance to Dream

Tom wakes up after a nightmare of being turned into a nail-shape and pounded into the ground by a giant bulldog. When he sees Jerry catching a bone, he flicks the bone with his finger and then Jerry wallops him on the head with it and runs off, stopping at a giant dog house. When Tom approaches it, he realises it wasn't a dream and runs off in horror.

Instead, a small bulldog (first seen in The Cat's Me-Ouch!) comes out. When Tom grabs Jerry, the bulldog grabs his tail and rapidly eats away at Tom's fur, spinning in a blur, until Tom is literally bits of sausage except for his head, and pounding his head to the ground. Jerry pats the bulldog as a reward, in which the bulldog licks Jerry in the face and snuggles up.

Tom has several attempts at catching Jerry, even attempting to attack the dog with a hammer, stuffing an oversized bone with a grenade, spraying himself with dog repellent, and lastly playing fetch with the dog by throwing a stick into a safe, and hurling the safe into a deep pit.

However, every time the minuscule pup manages to eat away at Tom, and in the final attempt when he grabs the mouse, the pup manages to chew at Tom's fur until he bits of sausage again.

Tom finally gives up, he takes some medicine and plays some smooth jazz on a record before going back to sleep and calmly dreaming of being pounded once again into the ground, which to Tom, has stopped seeming scary and has now become a rather pleasant thought, after all, it's better than dealing with that tiny mutt.

• Animation: Dick Thompson, Ken Harris, Don Towsley, Tom Ray & Philip Roman
• Graphics: Don Foster
• Layouts: Don Morgan
• Backgrounds: Philip DeGuard
• Design Consultant: Maurice Noble
• Vocal Effects: Mel Blanc, William Hanna & June Foray
• Production Manager: Earl Jonas
• Story: Irv Spector, Michael Maltese & Chuck Jones
• Music: Carl Brandt
• Production Supervised by Les Goldman
• Produced by Chuck Jones
• Directed by Ben Washam & Chuck Jones

Jones and Michael Maltese get additional director (Jones) and writer (Maltese and Jones) credits for reused footage from The Cat's Me-Ouch!. It was the last short in the series by MGM, the last of Jones' shorts, and the second-to-last short by MGM after The Bear That Wasn't. The next Tom and Jerry short, The Karate Guard, would be released in 2005 by Warner Bros.

The title is a play-on-words of "perchance to dream", a quotation from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

• Purr-Chance to Dream at The Big Cartoon DataBase
• Purr-Chance to Dream at IMDb