(no subject)

Being ever curious about the workings of my dog's mind, one of the things I tend to do is watch her as she's dreaming and try to figure out what her dreams are about. Most of the time they're not too hard to figure out, at least in generalities; paws and nose twitching (probably running through grass with her head low to take in the smells), eating, howling at being left alone. Generally recent memories of waking events, since they often correspond to things she's done that day. (I'll often whisper her name or touch her gently if she's howling or whining, since it sounds like she's having a bad dream. It seems to relax her.)

She barks in her sleep sometimes too, something she rarely does when awake (amusingly, she barks with her mouth shut when asleep); other times she has snarly dreams, and again she's very rarely snarly when awake. I wonder more about these dreams. Are they memories from a more distant past? Suppressed urges she doesn't express outside of sleep? Utter fiction, as our own dreams often are?

Today she did something I'd not seen before. At first I thought she must just be dreaming about drinking, since her tongue was out quite a ways and she was making some gutteral sounds I initially took for gulping. But her front paws--only her front paws--were moving, and she was making her snarly face. Then I remembered how she's still jumpy after all this time about being touched on her shoulder or chest while she's lying down, her wariness of raised arms and other indications of past abuse, her fright of children...

Sometimes I really wonder what this girl's been through.