Pup dreams
Thoughts on the unconscious Mind of Dog; ramblings on connection-building
Apologies for a late post! I was away at a conference this past weekend (more on that perhaps in another post) and then was rendered useless for a day or two by the government-mandated post-travel migraine. Pretty much back to full capacity now.
Do shelties dream of Shetland sheep?
I worry about my dog when I head out of town. This despite the fact that he is absolutely, definitely fine: he stays either at a very nice kennel or with my very nice parents or a very nice friend. He gets lots of attention and playtime, and the kibble floweth freely.
But he gets upset! He’s a very attached little guy and he gets stressed out when I disappear.
This is no original thought, but the main problem is that I can’t tell him I’ll be back in two days. Locked in his doggy head, he has no idea if I’m leaving him for twenty minutes or if This Is It, I’m An Adoptable Dog Now. It’s some milder cousin, I guess, of the experience of not being able to explain to a sick infant why you’re letting a doctor poke them.
I imagine Gus lives very much in the moment, and so I have to assume it’s “All’s well that ends well” as soon as I retrieve him. He seems to have no lasting psychological damage, but I’m no dog shrink.
But this led me to other thoughts about Gus’s mind. There have been moments when I’ve been absolutely touched by his reliance on me. Once when he was a puppy, for instance, he heard a big, fierce-sounding dog bark in a yard nearby and immediately ran to me to be picked up. The fact that he ran to me instead of trying to escape on his own was perhaps more moving than it ought to have been.1 It melts your heart to be someone’s (or some critter’s) place of safety.
So now I found myself thinking about Gus’s dreams. We imagine a dreaming dog chasing rabbits, observing his twitchy, running legs. But I have no idea what the running legs mean. They might mean nothing. Or might he not be running away from something?
And do I turn up in his dreams? The thought, once it had occurred to me, made me feel very vulnerable. If Gus dreams of me, am I good to him? Or does he have nightmares about me being mean? Or do I disappear again and again?
Again, “All’s well that… etc.” as soon as he wakes, I think. But it might affect him: I remember being a child and not realizing that a recurring dream of mine was not real. In the dream, I was always lying in my bed and trying to call for my parents, but I had no voice. Nothing was threatening me, but it was awful—and I didn’t know at the time that it was a dream. I just thought that sometimes in the night I lost my voice.
I hope Gus dreams of sheep he can herd—when he nips their ankles, they pop like a wooly piñata and spray freeze-dried liver treats everywhere. And I hope he then finds himself cuddled and petted and safe. I hope I’m good to him in dreams.
Of Boss Babies
I begin by recalling to my reader a classic tweet2:
I don’t know if this is a wider experience, but this tweet has become kind of a “Boss Baby” of my own… as it were… in the sense of becoming a reference in terms of which I tend to frame other experiences. If there’s a piece of media or a tool or a concept I always find myself relating things back to, it is a “Boss Baby” of mine.3
I acknowledge up front that the above isn’t a strict reading of the tweet in question. The tweet is about having been exposed to only one example of something, and then inevitably seeing the second example of that thing in terms of the first (in this case, an animated children’s B-movie about a talking baby voiced by Alec Baldwin).
An example of a Boss Baby, per my usage, might be an essay, or a philosophy, or a statement, or a movie, or a book that expressed something so compelling, it’s impacted the pattern your ideas tend to follow. You’ve been contemplating it in the background of your thoughts, such that if an interesting conversation arises, or you watch a completely unrelated TV show, you find yourself making automatic connections with your Boss Baby idea, even if those connections would seem completely unintuitive to another person.
I probably have a half-dozen going consciously at any given point (as I imagine most people do). A lasting one, for instance, is a way of framing the experience of the literary sublime that came up in an undergraduate lit crit course I took many moons ago.4 Very frequently I find myself going, “Oh, that’s that model of the sublime again,” when I come across someone discussing something that has nothing to do with the literary sublime but which is modelled in a way that seems similar to me.
I should note, lest I give you the impression that Boss Babies are supposed to be academic in nature, that this model of the literary sublime probably only stuck in my mind at the time because I found myself linking it to an earlier Boss Baby, the Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige. A lot of things are like The Prestige! … if you spend a lot of time thinking about The Prestige.
There are dangers to having Boss Babies. They tend to send your thought burbling down predictable ravines that get carved out deeper and deeper every time they’re flooded. I think it’s worthwhile, now and then, to try consciously resisting them and asking yourself, “Is there a different interesting way of thinking about this? What if I left that default connection to the side for awhile?”
On the other hand, I think Boss Babies do a lot to explain the importance both of life experience and of drawing on a variety of backgrounds in groups. I didn’t choose to watch The Prestige, for example, because I wanted to start making connections between various essays and [huge plot spoiler] Hugh Jackman murdering dozens of his own clones; nevertheless, I’m now going to be doing that as long as my neurons hold out. You don’t necessarily choose your Boss Babies.
More meaningfully, there are likely connections that only a stay-at-home mother would make because of a philosophy of laundering she’d arrived at,5 or that only a dairy farmer would make because of a story he’d told himself about what a cow needs, or… etc.
This is both humbling and encouraging, to my mind. The fact that my insights are in some sense limited by what I’m able to draw on—much of which I didn’t choose—reminds me of my finiteness and dependence as a creature. On the other hand, it heightens the meaning of my unrepeatable place in the world. The options available to me are not without constraint, but there can be meaning and freedom in this.6 Everything that has happened to me, everything that I’ve loved or thought about (or ignored, or despised), is meaningful in terms of what step I’m able to take next.
I recognize there’s a bigger issue here of probably being only half-aware (if that) of some of one’s Boss Babies. Much, as they say, to consider. I take comfort in thinking it will almost definitely bear some relation to David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla.
Hits du jour
Some good things of late:
I have a couple of Cathy Cullis’s tiny artworks that I need to get framed. I highly encourage you to check her stuff out and follow her—she has a lovely, grounded, humble and beautiful art practice, and her artwork (along with her historical dressmaking) brings me great joy.
When I was in Michigan this past weekend, no machine would accept my credit or debit card! A call with my credit card company established that this had to do with certain U.S. terminals requiring a ZIP code to be associated with the card. My Canadian address had none. I was told over the phone that I could ask the clerk to manually enter my credit card number and then only the numbers in my Canadian postal code, followed by two zeros… but I did not like the thought of having to tell bewildered 17-year-old cashiers to do this all weekend. I had decided to head to a bank for cash, when a different idea occurred to me: could I pay with my phone?7 Answer: Yes! Google Wallet to the rescue. (Tap phone on most credit card consoles that take tap payment.) Consider this a tip, fellow Canadians.8
We have a new pope! You are not learning about this here for the first time. But I’ve been benefitting from The Pillar’s coverage of the Conclave and post-Conclave, as well as prayers for Pope Leo XIV via the Ascension and Hallow apps. (O brave new world that has such doodads in it!) I also loved these “Popémon” cards that a woman at the Catholic Studies Consortium booth at the International Congress on Medieval Studies put out… on Friday, the day after the new pope was announced. She confessed to having stayed up very late the night before to make them.
That’s all for now, pals.
Maybe I am someone who tends to try to escape on her own… Psychotherapists now circling like buzzards…
They will always be “tweets” to me. I was there before he was.
Thank you to my fiancé John for fully embracing this.
I think the course was called “The 18th Century Sublime and the Birth of the Aesthetic”—one of those seemingly hyper-specific and esoteric courses you end up with due to scheduling constraints, but which finish by impacting your thoughts for decades. Also which force you to read Kant and feel stupid.
This line of thought was actually set off by an account of Mary Midgley connecting the history of philosophy with domestic work.
Shades of another of Natalie’s Boss Babies here…
Credit to John for doing this in recent months and making me think of it.
“I shan’t be travelling to the U.S. anytime soon” Okay right a tip for the extremely far-distant future then