Watching my dog dream
reflections on learned love and learned helplessness
He came to us a few months into the pandemic, a part of its short-lived novelty in everyone's lives. My older sister had asked for a Golden Retriever as a birthday present every year, and it just so happened that her endless optimism was rewarded by my parents. They needed a break from becoming shut-ins, they told us; they needed something hands-on, a new world to escape to. And so we quietly stole him away from his. We named him Kazo, the Japanese origin of which thoroughly mystified our extended families (and ourselves) - never mind that he was born on a farm in Punjab. We relegated ourselves to understanding - and raising - a ball of nomenclatorial oddity, a visitor from another world at a time when nearly everyone we knew wanted to leave ours.
My first memories of watching him sleep are colored with frustration and guilt. It was my turn to stay up with him as he howled against the bars of his crate for reasons indecipherable to me. His first nights at home often ended that way - even after a full day of playing, eating and sleeping, he found it in himself to stay awake until hours even I would blush to go to bed at, all while creating a cacophony that was absolutely disproportionate to his size. My father admired his tenacity. I began admiring noise-cancelling headphones on Amazon.
I would keep one hand on his crate in a halfhearted attempt at comforting him, and another on my laptop while I tried to find anime distracting enough to drown out the sounds of a child torn from his home, his siblings, his mother, nose pointing to the top of a thin metal rail where the moon should have been instead. Eventually, he would fall asleep, tiring himself out. Watching his stomach rise and fall, barely the size of my forearm in his entirety, I would wonder what we were doing to him. What this was doing to us. Whether any of this was moral in the first place.
I was used to being the youngest of the family - I have the exact age gap with my sister memorized as a party trick for people to smile at (3 years, 4 months, 5 days). Being a baby - the baby - meant more pliability, more redeemability, more future to hold on to. With Kazo's arrival, I was suddenly responsible for someone else, where all my life I had only been responsible for what was done to me. I held a fittingly childish resentment against him for disrupting my life even without meaning to. I shrunk away from mundane tasks like feeding or potty-training, I made faces when he licked mine, I tried my best to deny that my anxiety over his well-being, however suppressed, meant that I cared about him. Even as I finally warmed up to him, I was too caught up in the vastitudes of turning 18 and finally leaving high school to realize that he was going through adolescence in front of my eyes - it felt like he was four times bigger in a few passing seconds.
The internet says that puppies dream more than other ages, although I don't really remember Kazo dreaming until he was a year older. The first time I saw his paws - now nearly the same size as my palms - twitch in his sleep, I stopped in my tracks. It was momentous, it was unbelievable; it was a betrayal. Only a year ago, I was staying up late, crying to shitty emotional anime I hadn't planned on watching, to make sure he wouldn't be awake alone. After all those months of comforting him, a visitor from a world he didn't want to leave, here he was again; escaping somewhere I couldn't follow.
In the time that I've known Kazo, I have unconsciously memorized each of his physical cues and movements. The only commands he knows are the ones I have painstakingly taught him. When I reach over to wipe his eye discharge away every morning, he sits patiently, unafraid of the sharpness of my fingernails. While playfighting, I anticipate and react to his lunges before he even makes them. I can hear the quiet patter of his feet outside my locked room door, waiting to be let in, long before he actually sits down. The two of us have fallen into a strange synchronized dance, where I became used to teaching the steps and him following. Yet when he sleeps, I am forced to observe, completely bereft of any knowledge.
I watch his paws move up and down in silent hurry, his jaw curled in anger, the quiet puffs of his barks. More often than not, I watch his chest heaving with faint, bubbling cries, his forehead creased with concentration - or is it worry? - while he escapes enemies I've never heard or seen. Perhaps our neighbor's dogs, the Alsatian and a second Golden, who see us more than their own family, snarling at him, and sweet with me. Or perhaps in dreams he's finally friends with them. Perhaps in dreams he can vocalize the empathy which I've seen translated only silently in real life, his big sad eyes fixed on my face as I cry.
I describe my smattering of violent dreams as nightmares, but he goes through them every night, an endless cycle of biting, being bitten, chasing, being chased. My best friend laughs when I hand-feed him when he’s under the weather, when I’m wiping his mouth with a paper napkin after every meal while he waits to grab it, an impetuous prince - for all the care I obsessively impart to his life, there is absolutely nothing I can do about him being hurt in his dreams. I worry that I'm showing signs of being a control freak, but it's strange to be jolted from one extreme end of the knowledge continuum to another every single night. To feel this newfound frustration in being unable to protect him from his own neurons. I wouldn't wish it upon a mother.
A mother would tell you that there is no solution to saving someone from themselves - my own has, several times of late. But I have decided to keep stumbling from my bed to gently wake him up when he cries. To run my hand over his ears and lure him from the REM stage into a gentler sleep, one where he isn't endlessly running, and one where I don't have to helplessly watch. Even as he keeps to his own worlds, I match his tenacity, struggling to keep him in mine, one where I stop him from being hurt.
how beautiful 💚
You are so good at this. Please keep writing.