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torquillLast night I learned why I dream about dogs.
In waking life, I like dogs, on the whole. I'm definitely a cat person, but a friendly dog is welcome, and I tend to make friends with them easily. I read their body language well enough to distinguish between friendly, anxious, and hostile dogs, and I can react accordingly. The vast majority I meet are quite pleasant.
In dreams, however, they vary widely. Sometimes they are hostile, running after me or trying to bite. Sometimes they are friendly, accompanying me or playing around. Sometimes they are simply present, watching from the middle distance. There are single dogs, and packs. Most seem to be medium short-haired ones, like a Lab or Doberman. But why they appeared, and why there never seemed to be any predictable role for them, has baffled me for a long time.
It turns out that the dogs are other people.
Not people I know -- I see friends in my dreams, or people who feel very familiar even if I don't recognize them. I have conversations, and occasionally I remember looking at the other person and they aren't even known to me. So I have the same kinds of interactions everyone else does in dreams -- walking around a park, talking to a clerk in the grocery store, that kind of thing.
I think the dogs are the non-rational part of the humans in my dream. Freud might call it the id; others would call it the lizard-brain or the emotional (as opposed to intellectual) side. Dogs have very primitive logic, and they are difficult to reason with. They have impulses, whether it's to play or to fight, and they tend to act on them; even training has its limits. You can train a dog to operate simple machinery or recognize health issues in a human and get help, but you can't train it how to argue the ethics of the Trolley Problem. They are still, in a basic sense, animals.
So dogs, when they appear to me, represent the human animals that I interact with every day. Open, friendly, harmless; bullying, hostile, dangerous; disinterested or curious. They are people whose motivations cannot be reasoned with, whose better nature cannot be appealed to because this *is* their nature. And it echoes my feelings about people in general, because no matter how friendly the dog is, you can never fully predict what it's going to do. Any dog could snap someday, for reasons you don't comprehend. There is always a guarded quality to those interactions.
As much as I understand people, I almost never fully trust them. And when someone reacts to my rational, reasoned discussion by lashing out emotionally and heaping abuse on me, it's very much like approaching a friendly dog and suddenly having it lay its ears back and lunge at me. Yes, it might have an underlying reason, but that's not necessarily a consequence of my current actions, and therefore I can't possibly predict it.
I got bitten that way on Thursday, when I tried to set a boundary (being civilized and polite) and got hyperbole, overreaction, and a flounce in return. So when I had a dream where I was on a sidewalk at night, holding my phone (yes, I play Ingress in my dreams) and I started to jog down the street feeling happy and like I had left all my cares behind, it wasn't terribly surprising to be overtaken by a dog who tried to go for my legs, then stood off and bared its teeth, deciding whether to bite. As my main adversary in Ingress had just decided to cut off all civil interaction, the parallel made me see what was going on. In the dream I averted my eyes and turned away slightly, not challenging it -- but as I started to wake up and realize what was happening, I shifted my weight so that I could kick it if it lunged, and made plans to drop on it if it latched onto my arm. I'm done turning the other cheek to bullies and manipulators in this game, and I'm going to stand my ground and give as good as I get.
I think it may be interesting to see what roles dogs play in my dreams from here on, and figure out how that reflects my views of other people. I think I have a pretty good picture, but this perspective may provide some additional details.
In waking life, I like dogs, on the whole. I'm definitely a cat person, but a friendly dog is welcome, and I tend to make friends with them easily. I read their body language well enough to distinguish between friendly, anxious, and hostile dogs, and I can react accordingly. The vast majority I meet are quite pleasant.
In dreams, however, they vary widely. Sometimes they are hostile, running after me or trying to bite. Sometimes they are friendly, accompanying me or playing around. Sometimes they are simply present, watching from the middle distance. There are single dogs, and packs. Most seem to be medium short-haired ones, like a Lab or Doberman. But why they appeared, and why there never seemed to be any predictable role for them, has baffled me for a long time.
It turns out that the dogs are other people.
Not people I know -- I see friends in my dreams, or people who feel very familiar even if I don't recognize them. I have conversations, and occasionally I remember looking at the other person and they aren't even known to me. So I have the same kinds of interactions everyone else does in dreams -- walking around a park, talking to a clerk in the grocery store, that kind of thing.
I think the dogs are the non-rational part of the humans in my dream. Freud might call it the id; others would call it the lizard-brain or the emotional (as opposed to intellectual) side. Dogs have very primitive logic, and they are difficult to reason with. They have impulses, whether it's to play or to fight, and they tend to act on them; even training has its limits. You can train a dog to operate simple machinery or recognize health issues in a human and get help, but you can't train it how to argue the ethics of the Trolley Problem. They are still, in a basic sense, animals.
So dogs, when they appear to me, represent the human animals that I interact with every day. Open, friendly, harmless; bullying, hostile, dangerous; disinterested or curious. They are people whose motivations cannot be reasoned with, whose better nature cannot be appealed to because this *is* their nature. And it echoes my feelings about people in general, because no matter how friendly the dog is, you can never fully predict what it's going to do. Any dog could snap someday, for reasons you don't comprehend. There is always a guarded quality to those interactions.
As much as I understand people, I almost never fully trust them. And when someone reacts to my rational, reasoned discussion by lashing out emotionally and heaping abuse on me, it's very much like approaching a friendly dog and suddenly having it lay its ears back and lunge at me. Yes, it might have an underlying reason, but that's not necessarily a consequence of my current actions, and therefore I can't possibly predict it.
I got bitten that way on Thursday, when I tried to set a boundary (being civilized and polite) and got hyperbole, overreaction, and a flounce in return. So when I had a dream where I was on a sidewalk at night, holding my phone (yes, I play Ingress in my dreams) and I started to jog down the street feeling happy and like I had left all my cares behind, it wasn't terribly surprising to be overtaken by a dog who tried to go for my legs, then stood off and bared its teeth, deciding whether to bite. As my main adversary in Ingress had just decided to cut off all civil interaction, the parallel made me see what was going on. In the dream I averted my eyes and turned away slightly, not challenging it -- but as I started to wake up and realize what was happening, I shifted my weight so that I could kick it if it lunged, and made plans to drop on it if it latched onto my arm. I'm done turning the other cheek to bullies and manipulators in this game, and I'm going to stand my ground and give as good as I get.
I think it may be interesting to see what roles dogs play in my dreams from here on, and figure out how that reflects my views of other people. I think I have a pretty good picture, but this perspective may provide some additional details.
