dog dreams in september

It’s Sunday. The dog is twitching in her sleep. I think that means she’s dreaming. Her eye is barely visible through the slit between her eyelids and I’m watching it pinball back and forth. It looks like a casino slot machine, where those illuminated numbers race by in a blur. I wonder what she’s dreaming about. Chasing a squirrel? Swimming, her favorite thing. Or do you think dogs have the same kind of recurring dreams (nightmares) that haunt us human people, the species with the (allegedly) more active right brain creativity (allegedly)? Opposable thumbs is not what separates us from the animals. What separates us is the part of our brain that allowed homo sapiens to write The Great Gatsby or paint the Giverny water lilies or, in one miraculous case, be Anthony Bourdain.

I’m not saying dogs can’t be creative. I’ve seen this one (still sleeping) do some wildly creative shit in her day. Like when the ball gets stuck somewhere she (at first) can’t get to, and then spends a half hour sizing up the situation before finding a uniquely clever way to contort herself or knife the ball back to her with some kind of tool. It’s really remarkable! Or when she bides her time off to the side of a dinner table like an old-timey cop on a stakeout, waiting for her moment to snatch a piece of bread from a hand that let its guard down. She can be sneaky when she wants to.

But back to this idea of the “recurring'“ dog dream. You know the kind of dreams I’m talking about, at least for us human people. The one when you’re walking into a test that you didn’t study for. Or the one when you’re at school in your underwear. Or the one when you’re taking a test that you didn’t study for in your underwear. Or the dreams where you’re being chased (by someone?), or falling to your death. God damn that one. Dreams are one of those truly bizarre things that go with being human once you really think about it. Have you ever though about how weird it is that we’ve recognized this as a thing that happens in our collective experience? First, it’s weird that we have dreams to begin with. Then, to have dreams that recur in not just our own brains through different periods of our lives but recur across society across thousands of different people and backgrounds? That’s crazy to me.

Dog dreams. Do you think dogs have regular dreams where they pull up to the dog park but they’re wearing clothes? Do you think they have dreams where they’re falling?

What if in the dream that we (humans) have, the one where we’re being chased by something or someone, we’re actually being chased by our dogs? And they’re having the same dream but from the inverted where they’re constantly chasing something they can’t catch, and right before they finally do, they wake up? That would be a pretty cool thing, to share dreams with your friend like that?