dogs
My dreams are usually not entertaining. They are soul-erasingly dull, in fact, and of late, I always seem to be looking for missing words in the NYTimes Spelling Bee. In my sleep. Which means it’s not much different from being awake.
The other night, though, I had a fairly complicated dream about a scientist who was experimenting with aphrodisiacs in animals. He had a bunch of turtles in a small room and, upon being administered Viagra, the turtles developed unprecedented speed and kept running into the walls and smashing themselves into little sticks. It was horrible. It was an experiment gone terribly wrong.
In the next scene—and scenes they were—the scientist was doing a slow loop in a boat far from shore and hollering on his cell phone that he was sinking and couldn’t swim, and the camera catches his drain-circling progress from above, from where we can see that the front end of his boat is riding low due to his own Viagra-inspired effluent accumulating in the bow. And then—there’s a laugh track.
Yes. I dreamed a comedy. Not a good one.
Naturally, in the morning—the laugh track woke me up—I wondered why in hell I would dream such a thing. And in short order I remembered: it was all Ed’s fault. My friend Ed had recently informed me that you can get Viagra for your dog from Chewy.com. It is not any business of mine, or the State’s, how he came upon such knowledge.
I mean, I guess it could cheer up a morose pet, but not everyone at the dog park is going to see it that way. And it could lead to epidemic levels of abraded Dachshunds.
dogs
It just seems like one indulgence too far. Already dogs are expected to be fed a much finer menu than we are, in spite of the fact that they will happily eat raincoats. They’re eating whole beef, turkey, pork, carrots, green beans, lentils, chickpeas, and fish oil. We’re eating Mac’N’Cheese out of a box.
This is new. Back in the day, dogs, in their natural state, ran free in packs all day long knocking over garbage cans, and worked out the remainder of their diet from whatever Junior was slipping them under the dinner table, rounding it out with cat poop, old vomit, and socks.
Which is why it remains a secret that I keep our robustly healthy old cat Tater on a diet of grocery store kibble. Word gets out about a thing like that, and I can expect to open the front door one day and find Sarah MacLaughlan in the front yard singing a suicide-inducing song in the company of a pack of animal rights activists swaying with candles.
By which I mean, yes, this is a blue state.
Well, it turns out the Viagra for dogs is meant to treat their hypertension. That’s another thing. We were never meant to find out our dogs had high blood pressure. They were just opaque dog-shaped packages that did fine until right toward the end, when they got slow and urpy and then went to live on a farm to play with all the other dogs. Or fetched up on the grill of an Oldsmobile.
After a wonderfully free and possibly shortened life.
My dreams are always just slightly… off. I’m in my house, but it doesn’t look anything like my house actually does, or I’m in the apartment that Paul and I used to live in, but it looks different, or I’m in Wilmington or Philly, but again, it looks different. A lot of my dreams concern finding a toilet that is private; it usually turns out to be smack dab in the middle of a busy room. With no toilet paper. Or else trying to answer my phone or make a call and I suddenly forget how to use it. Or that I have stuff all over my house, when actually I’m a minimalist in RL. I used to keep a dream journal back when I was more creative, and some of my dreams back then were doozies. When I waited tables, I used to have nightmares that I was working alone, went into the kitchen for a few minutes, and the dining room would be suddenly packed. The nightmare stopped when this actually happened to me, and I handled it with aplomb.
Those are my dreams to a T. I’m told the toilet dream has to do with something you’re ashamed of and haven’t come to terms with.
Viagra was initially developed and prescribed as a heart medication.
I think most people would describe my dreams as nightmares. Most of them take place after an apocalypse that has seriously reduced the population and left the survivors to wander around a devastated world while hiding from other survivors. A few of them take place on other worlds (after an apocalypse often), magic is possible, I can fly, I am psychokinetic (if you can fly in a dream, you’re psychokinetic, also if you can push/pull/lift things with your mind or set things on fire). In many dreams I’m just an observer. Sometimes I’ll join the action mid dream. So a third person perspective that shifts to first.
There was a dream recently about a world where shape shifting was possible, but in order to shift into another form, a person needed to fully learn that other form by sculpting it first. There were roofed open air structures filled with giant sculptures, some buried in sand and monks crawling over them.
Nightmares are pretty pedestrian. Can’t find a bathroom, when I can, there’s a barrier. Obnoxious people making life worse. My father making a guest appearance.
Last night’s nightmare was a virus turning all the app symbols on my phone into obscene objects.
Bruce, you win! Those are such cool, creative dreams! They could be screenplays!
Ah, psychokinesis! Thank you, Bruce. Now kindly pardon me while I free associate. In The Space Child’s Mother Goose there is a verse that ends with lines (they’re all I can recall)
“And my thesis is well on its way —
An erudite thesis on psychokinesis
And that will be all for today!”
What does Pootie think of all this? Hmmm?
If Pootie has ever had any sexual tendencies, they have been buried under a diet of TV basketball and chocolate.
Now wait just a sec here. We were talking about Viagra for dogs, and the next thing I know everyone is sharing about toilet dreams and nightmare visions of malfunctioning phones.
To get back to the topic at hand, I wanna know if a dog’s vision while taking Viagra suffers the same side effect as a human’s vision under similar circumstances? A common side effect in humans is that their vision can temporarily be blue-tinted. I mean, to heck with being a human that wakes up rattled after having a can’t-find-the-toilet dream — how scared do you think Rover must feel when his vision suddenly looks like a vintage Joni Mitchell album cover??
Wait–wait–don’t they already see only kibble-colors?
I get weird dreams in my “second sleep” which happens after I get up early to feed the cat then go back to sleep and dream weird stuff, like riding a rickety Lego escalator to “nowhere”, at the top there is a narrow square by a wall, just enough space to turn around and clamber down a set of rickety box structures resembling stairs. Wandering around Doll Exhibitions/ markets and wanting to buy but having no money (just like real life there) so I carry a doll for a while then put her back on a different stall until I come to the “Tea Rooms” where I get confused because people are calling my name but someone else is answering them. Thank goodness this doesn’t happen every night. Most of the time I just go back to sleep with no dreaming.
I appreciate people who have odd but somehow coherent dreams. Mine are so pedestrian. Although lately I’ve been playing word games a lot.
I hope you keep a dream journal because that’s a doozy! Morning dreams are the best. I had to chuckle too because someone messaged me asking an inocuous question: “What kind of treats does Curtis like?” and my alarm bells went off…a question like that usually precedes a package stuffed with treats, which my still slender dog doesn’t need. Well, the conversation is still going on with links and exhortations about these all-natural, freeze-dried, low-calorie and doubtless horrendously expensive dog treats. Fine. Great! At least they’re not Pupperoni’s which smell like Satan’s taint. But he still doesn’t need them.
And he eats Fromm’s kibble, which I’m sure isn’t good enough, at all.
“Satan’s taint.”
I dreamed about dogs. We were going to get a puppy! We drove out to a pretty farm where all the puppies were inside a little fenced area, running about with brown paper bags over their heads. You had to choose one without being able to see its face. It was Puppies Anonymous.
I would really want to know what sparked that dream.
Since getting a CPAP I only dream about waking up without a sore neck , sore back, and getting snuffed out by ‘ the strangler’ . And forget about fantasy- or spicy dreams…..
What is that new maskless apnea device they’re advertising?
Great and delightfully peculiar piece, Murr!
Thoughts (which I still occasionally have):
What’s worse — “a pack of animal rights activists” or a pack of animals?
I LOL’d at “cat poop, old vomit, and socks.” I don’t know why, but I liked it.
I had frequent nightmares — the ones about being in a high place I could not climb down from were, years ago, replaced by dreams about not being able to get home (not being able to call for a ride because I couldn’t remember how to work my phone, not remembering where my car was parked, not recognizing the city I was in, not remembering the route home, etc.) — until my MD prescribed Trazodone to help me sleep. Now I still have dreams with similar plots, but with all the despair and panic missing. I guess that will do. I hope it lasts.
My similar bad dreams often involve driving a truck in reverse in pitch blackness and not being able to reach the pedal well enough to slow it down properly. I never seem to hit anything. Also, having to call someone on the phone and not being able to hit the numbers. Or hitting five of them and having to start over.
I’m feeling better about myself already.
My work here is done…