As muscular dystrophy continues to rob me of my strength, my evenings are generally spent in my recliner in front of the TV. It's not want I want to do, but is merely a compromise with the Forces of Evil. Now in his senior years, Max will occasionally jump up on the footrest of my recliner and lay down for a snooze. Cuteness overload occurs when he lays his head down on my leg and drifts off gently into slumber. Sometimes his dreaming antics are much more entertaining then the latest "Who Done It" on television. Do dogs dream? Yes, of course they do. While no one knows for sure what dog dreams about, a true dog lover can make a pretty good guess. Just like humans, they have good dreams and bad ones. When his paws are twitching I can bet he is pursuing squirrels, playing chase games in the yard with me, sprinting like lightning after a cyclist, or spinning circles of joy when I return home. And you know when the bad dreams have taken over.....whimpering, crying and jerking. Is he in a fight with another dog or hiding from a thunderstorm or fearing being left alone? Should I wake him? In Max's case, the old cliche, "let sleeping dogs lie" doesn't pass the test. When I gently shake him awake, he doesn't act aggressively, but rather has a short span of disorientation and then slips back into slumber. Researchers say larger dogs dream five minutes of each hour and since they spend half of their day sleeping, that equates to sixty minutes of imagination. My dream is that Max's dreams will always be happy, running free in the warm sun through soft grasses, be boundless as a pup, free of his arthritis, his deafness melting away so he can once again hear my voice. "Just wild dogs howlin' in the night. Hear 'em howl..." - Wild Dogs, Tommy Bolin Clayton, Ohio 1/1/22
|
