My friend and mentor Jon Katz is running an interactive storytelling experiment on Facebook. He asked his readers if they believed dogs dream and when the overwhelming response was "Yes!" he asked them to share their ideas of what their dogs were dreaming. As my dog Vader, who died earlier this year, aged, I would watch him in his bed and wonder as his legs twitched what he was dreaming. I even started a collage, which I have yet to finish, entitled "What Do Old Dogs Dream Of?" I am still working on that, but for now here is my response to Jon's experiment.
His legs twitch and move beneath him. He is not a small, black, pug curled up in his oversized Orvis dog bed – he is a warrior, a prince, a wolf. He runs through the woods, leaping over twigs, darting through streams. He follows his nose and the scents are strong and thick. He smells a rabbit, a squirrel, a deer. This time he ignores them all. He plows through the growing darkness and stops short outside their den – the two-legged ones. He watches, lifts his nose to the wind; they smell safe, they pose no threat. He creeps forward. One spies him, one of their pups – a chubby, furless creature.. She reaches out to him, and as he has done many times in many dreams and many lives before, he bows his head and lets her touch him. He licks her hand. She giggles and pats his head again. Soon, he will join her by the warmth of the fire, lay his head in her lap, crawl into her den. Others of his kind will be welcome here. The prince becomes a willing servant, a wolf only in a dream within a dream within a dream…