Sweet Dreams . . .

I’m really stressed because my dog is having nightmares.  You’d think that with everything I have going on in my own life, my dreams might take on a terrifying theme from time to time, but I rarely dream, and it’s even rarer that I have a bad dream.  But poor Lottie has been having horrible nightmares for the past couple of months, and I feel like I need to fix it somehow.

It started (or at least I noticed it, because I can be a very heavy sleeper) at Camp 1 in June.  She would yelp and cry from a deep sleep.  Sometimes she would jump up and run to a corner, snapping and growling.  I would go touch her and tell her to come get in bed with me, and she would cuddle up closely against me, sighing with relief that I was going to protect her from whatever invisible forces were threatening her.  The funny thing is, she never opens her eyes.  They remain closed during the yelping, the defensive posturing from the Scary Thing, and even when she comes and cuddles up with me, her eyes are closed the whole time.  So it’s almost like sleep-walking, or night-terrors, I guess.  Do people open their eyes when they sleep walk?  I actually don’t know.

So here we are two months later, and it happens almost every night, often multiple times each night. She has bitten me twice when I touched her during her dreams.  She bit me very gently, but last night she yelped and started growling and backing away from the cat, and I’m afraid she might bite a cat or worse, Noelle.  I just don’t know what to do for her, it makes me sad.  She is such a joyful dog all day long, and fearless, and then her sleeptime is so frought with fear.  I hope I can find something to help her through this.