If I Were a Dog

What are you when you close your eyes?

I was chatting with my good friend Laura Coe the other day and she said something that landed like a spark. “If you had been born a dog, you would be barking all day long. Not because you chose to. Because that is what dogs do.”

Something about that cut differently than the usual “you are not your body” conversation.

A dog barks, chases, sniffs, rolls in things it probably shouldn’t. Not because it decided to be that kind of being, but because the vessel it was given operates that way. The dog didn’t choose the vessel. It just showed up inside one.

Now look down at your hands.

You showed up inside this one. You think in language, you feel in emotions, you perceive through these particular senses. And because you’ve been doing it since the moment you arrived, you assume this is what you are. The thoughts feel like yours. The emotions feel like yours. The body, obviously yours. But is any of it more “you” than barking is the dog?

The ego does something interesting here. It takes the vessel’s activity and claims ownership. I am angry. I am tired. I am the kind of person who does this. But that is just the vessel running its patterns, and the ego standing next to it saying “that’s me.”

Now close your eyes for a second and feel that.

In waking life, we spend all day identified with one shape, one set of patterns, one way of being. So when we fall asleep, the mind does exactly what it was trained to do. It picks a shape and says “that’s me.” You show up in the dream as a body, walking around, reacting, forgetting that the whole scene is made of the same stuff you are.

But in a dream, you are not constrained to a body. You could be a dog. You could be the clouds. You could be a god. You could be the entire dream.

I like to practice this during the day. Not as a concept, but as a felt sense. Right now, if this were a dream, what shape would I take? I let the edges of “me” soften until I am not in the room but the room is in me. Not imagining it. Dissolving into it. Because that is closer to the truth than the small shape I usually walk around in.

When I do this enough during the day, something shifts at night. In the dream, instead of showing up as a character navigating a world, I become the world. There is no separation between the dreamer and the dream. The whole thing is one fabric, and I am all of it.

And when I wake up from that, there is this feeling. Integration. Consciousness and the subconscious, not two things anymore.

Just one continuous experience that happened to look different for a few hours.

You don’t have to do it the way I do it. Take the shape of anything you want. The point is not which shape. The point is realizing you were never the shape to begin with.

If you were a dog, you would bark. If you were human, you would be reading this. What will you be when you close your eyes?