Wordless Wednesday-Put A Ring On It

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

It’s no news flash that dogs dream.  Greyhounds most certainly do.  Given the similarity in all racing greyhounds’ upbringing and track experience, it’s not surprising that the nature of their dreams is also similar in many ways.  Blue has always been a prolific dreamer.  I have written before about his racing dreams.  When he first came to live with me, he had racing dreams once or twice a day.  Now in his dotage his racing dreams have slowed down a bit.  But I always know when he’s heard the call to post because he starts dream wagging his tail and then he’s running for all he’s worth, breathing like a true champion athlete.  The pace of the run slows and then stops.  I know if he won the race (or at least enjoyed it) by whether or not his tail wags at the end. 

Blue has several other types of dreams in his repertoire.  I have named them based on observation, so scientists and haters of anthropomorphism don’t flame me.  He has barking dreams, growling dreams and The Wolf Howl Dream. 

Blue’s barking dreams, as best I can tell, are happy affairs.  In consciousness, Blue rarely makes much noise.  He can be incited to roo on occasion.  He has taken to whining since Bettina joined us and showed him how much fun that can be.  And I have watched him bark his fool head off at a greyhound race he was not taking part in and at a few lure coursing and straight racing events. 

But in his dreams, Blue barks up a veritable storm. He takes in a huge breath of air and then barks with his mouth closed.  It’s almost the sound equivalent of skipping rocks.  The first bark is the loudest followed by a series of 3-4 more barks which get consistently smaller and lower in volume.  He can sleep bark for a dogs age.  Sometimes it degenerates into Blue blowing air out his mouth and flapping his jowly cheeks.  It's like when your shades roll up unexpectedly.  Often it is accompanied with some tail wagging. 

His growling dreams are far more sinister.  My peace loving, never hurt a fly, goofy big lug becomes something terribly fierce and scary to behold.  In these dreams, he starts by growling with a closed mouth but it isn’t long before he progresses to snarling, showing all his teeth and gnashing them.  His growls rumble out of him from deep inside.  My sweet loving boy becomes a vicious wild beast.  I wonder at such times whether this is just the opportunity to step outside his normal self and get his ferocious on or whether he’s facing some horrendous thing in his dream and is trying to protect himself.  Grammy tells me this dream should be considered proof that he once growled at her.  I remain a skeptic.

Blue’s last dream is the one that chills my blood though.  I have named this one The Wolf Howl Dream (and yes, it gets capital letters).  But for a few eye and ear movements, you probably wouldn’t even know he was dreaming this one.  At the end though, he lets out a long, low howl.  It is so mournful and evokes such feelings of loss and sadness that your heart breaks just hearing it.  Instantly visions of a lone wolf in deep snowy backwoods country come to mind.  It has always made me think of death and thus, I don’t like it.  What scares me most is that this dream was extremely rare when he was younger.  Maybe once or twice a year.  In the last year, its frequency has increased to monthly and in February, he had 2 such dreams. 

He always wakes himself up with that howl and he looks around bewildered.  I’m never sure if he’s bewildered to find himself back in our living room or if he’s bewildered by who/what made that noise.  Was my poor boy channeling the ancestral wolf in every dog?  Was he facing a vision of his own demise that seems to be getting closer and closer?  Or was he mourning the loss of something very dear to him?  Something that seems to haunt him more as he grows older.  Mumma will never really know.  With each Wolf Howl Dream I make sure he is fully awake and I rush to comfort him which is really more mumma trying to comfort herself and shake off the specter of my silly boy grown old too soon.

Is It Insanity or Is It a Date?

A dream is a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis
                                                                                                        ~Sigmund Freud

We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions
                                                                                                              ~Carl Jung

A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is unread
                                                                        ~Talmud

I had a dream not too long ago.  It involved Girly Girl.  My dreams involving Girly Girl have a different quality from my normal dreams and I can count the number of them since her passing on one hand.  I am of the firm belief that these are infrequent visits from my sweet girl.  Some of you may roll your eyes and I’m OK with that. 

Girly Girl usually stops in to say hi, let me know she still loves me and that she misses me.  She doesn’t “say” this to me but when she was with me in the physical world, she once gave me a greeting that made it so incredibly clear that she loved me and missed me it became the gold standard.  It was after her cancer

diagnosis and close to her passing.  I had to travel for a week for work so she stayed with Grammy.  I think we both knew that time was short and any time away from each other was so painful.  When I went to pick her up after that trip, she nearly crawled into my skin in her attempts to get as close to me as possible.  Girly Girl, who wasn’t a licker, greeted me like an excited puppy trying to lick my face all over.  She stayed melded to me for some time. 

I’ve never had a greeting like that before and now I only receive it when she drops in on my dreams.   I think she knew how much that particular greeting meant to me so she uses it now to make sure I am clear on her message. 

This dream was different.  It was the first dream in which she did not pop in and give me our greeting and then pop back out.  Instead I was approached by a person who told me that Girly Girl had “come back.”  I didn’t know what that meant and I said that couldn’t be possible as she was dead.  The person insisted that she was back and I needed to come.  Since I would give a whole lot for that to actually be true, I went with this person. 

They brought me to a place where a small group of people were in the company of a spindly, petite white female greyhound with black ticking and larger brindle patches.  I told them that this was definitely not Girly Girl.  But the group kept insisting that this was Girly Girl.  I approached her and she was very spooky.  She did her best to avoid being touched.  The group helped hold her still and I checked her ear tattoo.  The birth date ear said 716A.  It was at this point I woke up.

At first, I found the dream just odd.  As a few days passed I was sitting in my mother’s living room discussing the dream with her.  I replayed the dream and then out of nowhere I said to my mother, I think this might mean that Girly Girl is coming back and when she does, she’ll be in the guise of this new hound. 

If the tattoo is any indication, she will be born in July of 2016 so she was apparently giving me plenty of advanced warning.  I figure that the earliest she’ll be able to find her way to me will be in 2017 assuming she fails out of a life as a racing greyhound and goes straight into adoption.  Grammy thinks it’s possible that she’s timing the return to be just after Blue’s passing.   He will be 14 in 2017.

I know it sounds crazy.  And honestly I’m trying to convince her to stay put where she’s whole and pain free.  Coming back could expose her to any number of terrible experiences.  Her last go-round wasn’t particularly fabulous.  She broke her hock and it wasn’t treated.  Then she got only a few years in retirement with a new to greyhounds owner who needed a big lesson in patience.  Shortly thereafter she got cancer, had to go through an amputation only to finally succumb to ever growing tumors in her lungs.  Why she’d want to expose herself to that possibility again is beyond me.  I miss her like crazy but I can wait and meet her on that side if it means she runs free. 

So nut job?  Maybe.  Creating something I need to believe from a simple dream?  Also possible.   In this case, only time will tell.  Just to be safe I have Auntie Carol checking all the ear tattoos of the new arrivals that match my description.   I invite you all to check back in here in 2017 or 2018 to see how this story ends!