Dogs of Rerverie

I was walking in Central Park when it hit me. I had a dream dog. A dog of reverie. 

What is a dream dog? 

Reverie is a day dream, but soulful, an experience of wonder. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard popularized it as rich innocence: “Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life…. Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us…”  

 

I was beside the boathouse in the park when I saw it. Bachelard had it wrong! Its dogs who help us find this living childhood! Poets, maybe, sometimes. I’d grant Wordsworth or Blake their laurels. But a good childhood, one of imagination comes from feeling you belong among the trees, that you can walk aimlessly or on purpose. 

 

Corky and I sat and listened to the boaters. One woman said: “are there fish in here? I don’t like fish!” Her companion, another woman, laughed. It was a good laugh. 

There was a light breeze. It was made a rippling sound, as if invisible sails were all around us. 

 

A dream dog has the muscularity–the solidity of a good ego. She knows how to walk with courage and insight. She gives me the same. 

 

She knows the world unfolds around us. Dogs have always known this. They know it because “reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

 

We followed the shore of the pond. Walked up a hill. All our steps were refreshing. 

 

**

A dream dog helps me presume competence. I am the king of the next 100 yards. We come to a construction site on the upper West Side of Manhattan–one of those nearly medieval transverse plots that confuse the sighted and terrify the blind. Jackhammers and steam. And an odd sound, something like a xylophone. Corky enters the fray and turns, stops, looks around, and takes me off the sidewalk and along the edges of something–a string of pylons perhaps–all I see are blurred colors. She’s moving quickly. Then we’re back on the sidewalk and going on our way. 

 

Dream dog. We step out into the emptiness between stars. I think less of the dangers and more about that xylophone–what was that thing? What sounds like Lionel Hampton in the midst of a New York construction site?