The Cookie Chronicles – Chapter 20-Dog dream

Over many decades I’ve been the proud parent of many cats but just one dog. And though cats are big-time nappers (who do you think invented the cat nap?) I don’t ever recall wondering if they ever dreamed, or what they might dream about.

Sleeping with the dog has brought those questions front and center.

Front and center is where Cookie likes to be after sliding, gliding, squirming, and sneaking her way into the prime spot in bed, pressed up on both sides against the Big Dogs (me and Mrs. G). Once in place, she quickly shapeshifts and becomes an immoveable 200 pound mastiff, while she assumes a position closely resembling a dining room chair turned on its side. With four legs outstretched and her back solidly braced, she’s quickly asleep, and we dare not disturb her.

We do our best to fit ourselves around the dog and start to drift off. That’s when the sound effects begin.

At first, it’s a light, rapid, high-pitched wurfing. It sounds like someone with a bad case of the hiccups after swallowing a whistle. Wurf wurf wurf whoop whoop whistle... SNORT! Then it stops for a while – just long enough for us to begin to doze off – and then here it comes again, only louder. Wurf wurf whoop whoop whistle whistle woof woof woof.

That’s the cue for Cookie to begin kicking. Possibly she is running in her sleep. Now the show is in full flower, and we have a soundtrack to go along with the experience of being kicked in our own bed by an agitated dining room chair. The chair is getting plenty of rest, but the other inhabitants of the bed are completely wide awake.

“Cookie’s dreaming again,” says a sleep-deprived Mrs. G., “Ya think?” mumbles her grumpy spouse. “Poke her and she’ll stop.” “It’s your turn to poke her. I don’t want to get growled at again.”

And so it goes. Eventually, thoughts turn to speculation about what exactly is going on in the mind of the sleeping dog. Research on dogs dreaming is a bit scanty. There is general agreement that they do dream. On the American Kennel Club website (https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/what-do-dogs-dream-about), the consensus is that dog sleep goes through very human-like cycles, including the REM (rapid eye movement) stage that prompts the most vivid dreams. Given that dogs sleep at least 12 hours a day (and more as they age), there’s plenty of opportunities to dream about something.

Following one complicated experiment designed to gain some insight into the content of dog dreams, the best that researchers could come up with was “what we’ve basically found is that dogs dream doggy things . . . The dream pattern in dogs seems to be very similar to the dream pattern in humans.”

So dogs dream like dogs, and humans dream like humans. Not much help there.

Like many people, my own dreams fall into several clear categories. There are bathroom dreams (usually grimy, embarrassing and/or completely dysfunctional). There are late-for-something dreams where I’m packing desperately to catch a ride to a plane due to take off in about 10 minutes. There are also lots of dreams where I’m back in some odd version of a long-gone home, wondering who left all the rotten food in the fridge.

None of these seem to be likely themes for Cookie. Bathroom privacy is not a need or a fear. If she had a bathroom dream, it would certainly involve Mr. B, which would make it a ball dream. Now that might actually be something with potential. Desperately searching for Mr. B while packing for a road trip that’s about to leave without her? Possible.

Clearly, the most “doggy thing” that Cookie might be dreaming about would have to feature the neighbor’s cats. There are several, and they roam free as cats often do. They particularly enjoy strolling casually along the sidewalk in front of our fence, knowing that Cookie will not come through that fence to chase them. What she will do is set up a barrage of barking and running and, in every possible way, threatening to dismantle the offending cat without ever actually getting past the fence.

So, there’s a dream topic with legs (pardon the pun). I suspect that in her most vivid dreams Cookie is barking (wurfing) chasing (hence the kicking) and one suspects coming much closer to actually terrorizing the dream cat than is possible in real life.

Research also indicates that dogs may occasionally have bad dreams, even nightmares. It’s happened to Cookie on rare occasions, where suddenly the wurfing turns to panting, the kind of high anxiety breathlessness that when awake indicates panic. In that situation, I can only surmise that she is dreaming that she’s horribly late for lunch, and we’ve run completely out of bacon.