Two Dreams of One Dog

I've been sick the last couple of days and last night at about 3 a.m. I woke Wendy and myself up with a coughing fit. I decided to get up, suck on a ColdEze losenge, and sleep on the couch.

I noticed that Wendy had the dog blanket out on the couch. The dog blanket is warm and fuzzy, and it allows us to break the house rule of "no dogs on the couch"--It's a mostly psychological thing. And since it was already upstairs, I invited Cinder to come up and sleep with me on the couch.

Sleeping with a dog like Cinder is as much problematic as it is comforting. It's nice to snuggle up with her, but invariably we just keep waking each other up everytime one of us moves. We tried a variety of positions, usually with her chin resting either on my ankle or my hip, for a few hours before she finally gave up and retired to her place in the kitchen.

But in our interupted sleep, she had a starring role in two of my dreams.

Bad Dog: I woke up from sleeping on the couch and felt tiny, brittle leaves all over me. I reached out to the coffee table and felt them covering the surface. I got up from the couch to turn on the light and could feel and hear them crunch under my feet. I also felt as though I were walking on bits of plastic and soft little bodies, like the corpses of bugs. When I turned on the light, I saw our entire stock of breakfast cereal thrown about the living room and their boxes torn to shreds. Cinder, in a satisfied, playful pose, watched me from the corner of the room and wagged her tail. I was so angry at her that I repeatedly screamed "Bad dog!" at her and didn't care if I woke up Wendy. I picked her up and was hitting her legs (including the 6 Million Dollar leg) until I got to the door and could physically throw her outside. I was quickly swallowed by guilt and worried that I had irreparebly hurt her.

Good Dog: I was sleeping on the couch and Cinder woke me up by dropping something in my lap. It was an electronic device about the size and weight of a closed laptop computer. On one side was an array of 20 or so square buttons, each with a picture inside. Cinder nudged my arm with her nose and wagged her tail. I held the device up for her and she pressed buttons with her nose that made the device say in a robotic voice, "Kibble. Kibble. Walk."