Puppy Dog Dreams

It has been a tough year so far but I have to tell you, my heart is full.

Why?

Puppy dog dreams.

The day job has been horrible to the point of making me sick to my stomach. But you know what? I woke up Thursday morning with a deeper appreciation of the simple things in life and for the first time in a long time, some of that stress tying my guts up in knots has released.

I rarely ever dream. I don't care what the dream experts say, if I can't remember having had a dream, I didn't dream. I don't usually get more than 6 hours sleep a night, so there's no room in my schedule for dreaming. But in the wee hours of Thursday morning, I had a dream.

I can't remember most of it. Can't even tell you the gist of what it was about. What I did wake up remembering, though, was that in the dream, I was surrounded by three wonderful, loveable dogs.

Dogs are my favorite people. They represent to me everything that is good and right in the world. I am never more at ease than in the company of dogs.

The Lord knows my life is chaotic and He knows how much I adore His four-legged creation, the dog. And I think that dream was sent to me expressly for the purpose of dissipating some of that stress and also to give me something else to think about.

Because all Thursday, all I could think about was Cesar Millan aka The Dog Whisperer and what I've learned from watching him. It made me think of the times when he rehabs a dog that has been severely abused, mistreated or neglected, and the mistreatment causes the dog to become extremely shy and to quit using his nose--the primary mode he has for living out his life and taking in all it has to offer. These dogs hunch in on themselves--if they could disappear, they would do so gladly. Their little noses are pulled as far back from any human or animal as they can get.

It reminded me that was an analogy of my life. In my work I'm not physically abused. But it is abusive in other ways--any time an employer sets up a situation where you can't possibly succeed, so that your days are spent getting reamed out by customers, it is a form of abuse. It makes for a very unhappy and extremely long 8 hours a day. Worse, it kills your creativity, cell by cell.

My primary mode for living out life is the written word--it's my sensory organ of choice. Humans may be primarily sight-hounds but I don't process much of life without the written word. And as work has killed the creativity, I have, by equivalent, been hunching in on myself, refusing to write, too incapacitated to use my "nose".

But the combination of the Genesis win, supportive friends and family, and finally, a simple reassuring dream filled with wonderful dogs, has enabled me to start inching my nose out just a little. Still hesitant. Still ready to retract it at a moment's notice--but inching it out there fraction by fraction.

Just as it takes a good while to rehab a fearful, shy dog, so it will take a while to bring creativity back into full play.

But at least now I have the hope that it will happen.