Cat keeps waking me up

is he siamese? i've had three of those and one dsh and the siamese have all done this.

my first one would go in the bathroom and holler sometimes. once i caught him and he looked embarrassed and left. i swear he was doing it because it sounded louder in there.

at one point he would do it every night about 3 AM in a really ugly meow. i took him to the vet, he said all was well, i have no idea why he was doing it but it sounded awful. i was afraid my neighbors would think i was torturing him.

the two i have now do it at different times. the older one sits out here and does it late at night and often will walk up to my bed, yowling (somewhat muffled) with a toy in his mouth, so i've assumed he wants to play. the other one does it on top of the cat walk (my kitchen cabinets) and occasionally will zoom onto my bed and yell, "me-YOW" and run off and come back and do it again. he almost sounds like he's hunting, or reprimanding someone. it's sort of angry-sounding. the other one sounds sad.

i don't know why they do it, and i don't know how to make it stop. i've learned to sleep through it, but i live downtown and there's a lot of street noise (a light rail train that dings every 15 minutes and drunk shouting people) that i've tuned out as well.

unisom? ear plugs? lol

(yours probably wants to play so i recommend never responding to him. if he gets no response ever, he'll probably stop. if you ask him what's wrong or tell him to come to bed, he'll take it as getting *some* attention and figure it will just take a little more perserverance to get you up and playing. but if he does it in the daytime something may be bothering him physically and only the vet can rule that out.)

You are seeing natural cat behavior. A cat walking around with a toy or object in his mouth and vocalizing is doing the equivalent of 'calling the kittens to eat the prey'. My one male does it every night and I have learned to sleep through it. Rosie goes into the catroom every night before her first nap and calls her two kittens to her, I guess telling them it is time for bed. The kittens are a year old now, so they both run to find out what she is calling for and then leaving once she lies down to sleep.

I also think Ziggy wants you to wake up and keep him company. He is lonely. To combat this you have two choices. Lock him up in a room as far from your bedroom as you can so you do not hear him call you and he has no resort to rattling the door to get you to come to him, or deliberately play with him and tire him out before bed so he will lie down and sleep and leave you sleep as well. At four years old he is fully mature and feel he is in charge of making sure you do what he wants you to do, when he wants you to do it!
My cats sleep with me in definite shifts. Two of them are there the entire night, the others come and go. If one wakes me up yowling at night (unusual), I just call their name and tell them to come to me. Even if they do not come to me, they stop yelling. I can also tell when a vocalization is because they looked out a window and saw something that they felt they had to challenge with a yowl. Again, I will call out the cat's name and just go back to sleep.
The key to sleeping with cats is making sure they are tired at YOUR bedtime, that they are not hungry and have a few snacks available over night and that they understand you do not want to play in the middle of the night. If they bring you a toy and wake you up to play, put that toy away where they cannot get to it and go back to sleep. This, more than any vocalization, says NO!, I am not available to play. None of my cats will bring me a toy in bed, but they often bring me a toy when I am in a chair downstairs, etc.
Create boundaries and maintain them. Understand what their vocalizations mean. Ziggy is going through a new stage in his self view and you just have to go through it with him and guide him to better behavior.