What do we find when we look at our sleeping animals?
Do we find examples of tranquil rest? Do we find slumbering role models? Do we find something to envy?
Do we see dozing dogs dreaming of chasing playmates across a big back yard? Or rabbits across a field?
My apologies to the bunny rabbit folks for bringing up an unpleasant thought!
(God bless the North Texas Rabbit Sanctuary for the work it does. Check it out at www.ntrs.org. Before we move on from the rabbits, we've been citing slumbering animals for a few years now in Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap and I have yet to see a photo of a sleeping rabbit? Are they that hard to catch asleep?)
Back to dogs: Do dogs dream of chasing cats?
Surely you've seen your dog flat out asleep with its forepaws "running" through a dream. I don't care if you have a tiny dog that has never touched the ground with its own feet, that little dog will dream of running.
Perhaps it is a historic dream -- something retained in the genes from when 
that Yorkie was a member of a wolf pack and enjoyed a good romp through the forest after whatever big beast the ancients were chasing.
Maybe the "running dog" is dreaming of chasing a cat. One of our dogs, Annie, may actually jump up and chase a cat -- the rest of the dogs learned not to stick their noses within reach of a cat. Annie is young (that's her bandage-free nose in the photo on the left) and she's learning.
We have seen the cats chase a dog or two.
Who knows what cats are dreaming of when they are sleeping. High finance, probably. We have four cats in our current population -- all of them sleep without motion, except for Griffin, the big orange cat (below left), who purrs like the diesel engine on a well-tuned bulldozer while the driver takes a coffee break.
While we consider the possibilities of the sleep experience, I'll explain that 
the dog in the photo is, indeed, Annie. While she has a heeler coat with black patches, she has a ringed-tail, like that of a lemur.
And, in this window scene, you can see that she couldn't figure out what to do with her tail on the back of the couch, so she simply ran it up the window 
frame and went to sleep.
A few days later, in the same spot on the couch, I photographed our multi-hued old girl Benchley, rescued as a kitten 15 years ago from a wild kingdom in a storage shed behind the late, lamented Theater On The Hill in Cedar Hill. She is our Theater Cat. Always hits her marks and knows her lines. She's never come into a scene too early and never declared that the production was beneath her talents.
She is elegant and given to sleeping in specific places -- one of those places is the guest room and when she cannot get through the closed door to the bed, she will sit in the hall and yowl as if she is trapped in a well. It is an insistent yowl that penetrates every human thought in the household. The dogs sleep through it. The humans cannot. (The cat series here shows Benchley sleeping, waking, realizing there's another cat, Annabelle Bob, behind her and getting up and leaving.)
Now, in the nearly three years we've been presenting Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap each weekend without fail, we have yet to feature a sleeping guinea pig, hamster, horse, donkey, cow, rabbit, reptile, bird, fish, turtle, wallaby, kangaroo, possum, skunk, raccoon, gorilla, monkey, chimp, orangutan, coati mundi or horned toad.
What I'm saying is this: People, surely you have photographs of these sleepers. Or even a photo of your deadbeat brother-in-law or cousin who 
comes to your house and snores like a foghorn and looks like an old goat sleeping in your recliner. Surely.
If so, send those photos to dallrp@aol.com and we'll happily post them for all to see.
Also, rescue groups, if you have animals that look particularly sweet while sleeping and you are trying to drum up interest in that critter, e-mail the photo and the story of the animals to us. We are determined to make sure every animals in the world has a safe place to sleep.
Oh, yeah, we don't have too many candid shots of some of our dogs because, frankly, they despise the paparazzi.
(One more time, send photos and info to dallrp@aol.com and we'll post the slumbering rascals in our weekend feature, "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap." Remember, at Readlarrypowell.com we honor sleep because we are insomniacs, often laying awake nights wondering if the next sleeper and napper photos are already in the in-box.)
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