Presa

Date: 1/27/2017

I've repeatedly had a dream about a big presa canario dog trying to get out of a gate or break his chain to get at me. This time, he was an old and weary dog, torn up by age. He was chained up on a rusty and broken chain behind a dilapidated, broken down fence. With a sluggish yet persistent effort, the presa broke its chain and started working at the gate as I was walking by. Next it got under the gate but it's chain got entangled in the gate so that it was still stuck. With what seemed to be a Herculean effort (you could see the pain and blood in his eyes and hear the weakness in its barking and growling) the presa began to overcome his chain. First he slipped his forelegs through the collar around his neck until the collar, attached to the chain, was around his waist and was constricting his legs. He persevered, struggling to get free with his forelegs until his waist and hind legs squeezed through the collar like a banana squeezes out of its peel when you squeeze one end of the peel really hard. This struggle was long and drawn out. In the dream I pitied him and his drastic and irrational efforts to terrorize me. That's part of the reason I slowed down, I guess; to watch. When he was free, I didn't really feel fear. I just felt an intense and overwhelming heat, almost as if I felt what the dog was feeling. With a desperate and sluggish effort he pursued me. Across the street from the house the dog lived in, there was another house with an old truck in the driveway and then a fence separating the driveway from the green in front of the door of the house. The fence seemed meaningless; it was completely perpendicular to the house and shaped like a lightning bolt. It wasn't even attached to a fence that went around the house or anything. When the dog approached me, I hopped over to the other side of the fence whenever it got too close to me until I reached the middle of the lightning bolt. Part of the reason I stopped avoiding the dog was that I tripped while hopping over the fence. It wasn't a trip to where I fell on my face but you can imagine struggling to stay up after hopping over a fence over and over would only magnify the fatigue. But I wasn't so fatigued as this old dog was and I was tired of letting it chase me. The main reason I tripped was because I landed awkwardly on two bricks laying right at the break in the lightning bolt; two chances to kill this dog. Luckily, I tripped in such a way that I was able to lean on the old truck in the driveway so that I didn't completely lose my balance. I grabbed the brick, the dog jumped over to my side of the fence and then I woke up at 2:37 am.