About a dog
On Monday night I dreamed about waking up and thinking I needed to let my dog, Kiko, outside to pee.
In my dream, Kiko pushed the door open and ran off as I was bending over to connect his lead to his collar. I gave chase and dreamed of chasing him around my neighborhood in the middle of the night with him staying just out of reach.
Eventually, I woke up feeling more tired than when I had gone to sleep and as I started to get up to let Kiko out, I remembered that he has been gone for a few months now already.
I seldom remember much about my dreams other than that they reflect a somewhat boring and ultimately self-defeating tendency to be reruns of my waking life with special emphasis placed on when I have said or done the wrong thing. It is nice to know my subconscious mind keeps a massive file of my life in screw-ups, to pull out and replay presumably as a way to ensure that I remain humble.
As dreams go it is a fairly pedestrian one. There were no giant purple robots destroying the downtown or lizard people dressed up as government officials or hundreds of dog-sized bullfrogs being driven through town like an old-west cattle train.
Nope, it was just me chasing my dead dog around in the cold and dark while trying to not wake up the neighbors.
This got me thinking. Perhaps, there was some deep meaning behind the dream. Who knows, maybe it is a sign that I need to go do something or that worse, someone is lurking about waiting to do something to me.
With this somewhat cheerfully chilling thought in mind, I went to the font of knowledge known as Google and entered “dog dream, what mean?” Yes, I realize that as someone who writes professionally for a living and who has multiple awards for writing (I know, it is kind of hard to believe myself), I should have been much more eloquent in my question.
In the merest blink of an eye from hitting the return key, I was connected to an online dream dictionary which promised to provide the deep meaning behind virtually any dream.
According to this somewhat sketchy source, “A dream about a dog is associated with powerful emotions and is usually indicative of important issues in one’s life. If you have previously owned the dog or you see your own dog in your dream, it means that you are missing something or someone in your life. This is a sign to relax and take it easy.”
As I went further down this dreamscape rabbit hole, I saw that dreaming of black dogs represents having negative emotions, while “A dead dog in a dream represents a transformation especially if this is the previous dog that you owned and that the missing dog indicates you are missing something important in your life.
I know a lot of people who put stock in dreams revealing what is going on in your subconscious. I also know people who swear by using chunks of pretty rock to channel mystic energies and others who actually understand what reserved unreserved accounts are in municipal accounting and how they are utilized in GASB rules. If you find someone who is proficient in all three, you should probably start running and not stop until you are far away.
As for me, I can buy into that what our dreams are about is a reflection of something our waking minds have filed off for additional processing. Either that or it “[M]ay be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,” to borrow a line from Charles Dickens.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
