Eavesdropping

Last night I rolled into bed around 3:00am; just as I was getting cozy, I became aware of a conversation going on outside. Between dogs. It reminded me of online chat; a series of 4 or 5 barks from a little fellow to the west, a response from the north, a short comment from the south west, a skeptical question from the north east. They were trying to keep their voices down.

But I wondered about their lifes; most of them didn't have much contact with their fellow-kind. Perhaps they remember siblings and a mother, when the were very young, before adoption by their human hosts, whisked away into isolation. Living with their "owners", maybe seeing their own kind briefly in passing during walks or a drive to town. Not like the villages of old, or even the country-sides.

I listened curiously, trying to pick-up the nuances. To my human ears, the bark of a single dog didn't seem to vary much, but perhaps with their broader range of hearing all sorts of inflection was happening. Dogs are remarkably telepathic though, knowing when their owners are coming home early, for example, before any physical evidence of the fact. So I wondered if they didn't need all the articulation of human sounds and language; maybe the barks were just carriers, or brackets, and the message was the thought being sent between the parenthetical marks of the sound. So I tried to listen in a different way.

I let go of the thinking stuff and just watched what images or feelings popped up with the barks. Things got fuzzier. LOTS of stuff popped up, so this needed some refinement and I fiddled with the idea of "tuning." Some streams were happening within my own head, nothing to do with the dogs, some were happening in what seemed to be outside myself, but again, not connected to the conversation at hand. And finally, a small strand seemed to actually be the dogs. But then a very odd thing happened.

I had *almost* got the meaning of the last doggie retort, when the next one came and the full meaning flashed into mind, compressed into two short barks, "Someone listening, shut-up." And then there was silence. The barking that had been going on in spurts for about 30 minutes straight across the neighborhood shut down like the power-grid in an ice storm. I was thinking it was just an interesting walk in the imagination, but the timing was a bit eerie. And it was all quiet until I fell asleep, some 15 minutes later.