do dogs dream in dog time?
I’ve long been skeptical of the existence of objective linear time, so I’m primed for Truls Wyller’s argument in What Is Time? that without human actions “physical events have only a perceived, general duration” and that time is “inextricably connected to the existence of human, acting subjects” (139-40). Sure, the world existed before us and will exist after us, but the meaning of time — past present future, then and now — that’s all human, all subjective.
Take deja vu. I can’t ignore how often I remember that I’ve had an experience before, and not just a similar experience but this one exactly. Weirder is deja vu two layers deep: remembering that I’ve already once before remembered what’s happening now. Or reverse(?) deja vu: not having remembered, but having predicted, having dreamed previously, of the present that’s now unfolding.
Then there’s how much the perceived speed of time can vary. When I got the recordings of my B.A. organ recital back, I was shocked to hear how fast I had played. I rushed through every single piece, but had no sense in the moment that I was playing any faster than normal. I was nervous and my heart was racing — racing fast enough, apparently, to drastically change my inner sense of tempo. My professor and organist friends could tell the difference, but other friends and family in the audience couldn’t. Of course, the latter had never heard me rehearse; they had no reference for what the tempos should have been. But couldn’t it also be that they were nervous for me, with me, and that our senses of time sped up together?
Sped up — in reference to what? That’s always the snag, isn’t it? In the end, when it comes to time and memory, we have to rely on subjective description. We can’t prove an objective measure of time because we can’t get outside of our own perceptions to do the measuring. Which I know is begging the question or making a god of the gaps or whatever, but still. It doesn’t change how I live my life, and I don’t look straight at it too often, but I am just vaguely suspicous of the notion of time.
Wyller writes that “dogs can be physically and mentally affected by things that have hapened, but they do not sit and chat about them” (119). To which I say: are you sure? Dogs’ experience of the past might seem lesser than ours, but the “seem” is operative. Lacking shared language, we only have their behavior to guess by. And in order to not privelege our own subjective experience, my guess leans more toward different than lesser. Perhaps a dog’s “self–understanding is not dictated by career choices and other long–term projects” (120), but dogs can have jobs, and do develop long–lasting loyalties. Who knows what that means to them?
And dogs definitely dream. When my parents’ black lab, Fischer, runs and woofs in his sleep, is he reliving specific squirrel chasing memories from earlier today? from yesterday? from a month or year ago? Are his dreams a hodgepodge mosaic of squirrel and squirrel–adjacent images, linked by stronger or weaker associations? I assume he dreams as he sees, in grey.* * But who knows! My dad sees color when awake, but dreams in black and white… Then again, most of my own dreams aren’t visual at all (at least that I remember in the morning). Are his dreams just flashes of sensation, feeling, the sense of the chase? Are his movements signs of dreams at all, or just electric signals shooting below even his unconscious brain?
What’s real? perceived? projected? Even if Fischer had our language, I think he’d find it near impossible to say.
dreams fauna fido mind time wyller