Canine Night Vision

The Forces of Dog

In a dream Josie was with me as a little kid, running though golden, mid-western fields. The little girl me says, "I wish Josie would have really been my dog when I was a kid; she would have been perfect for me." 

Some people say that animals don't have emotions as we humans do, that we project our own dramatic feelings onto dogs and such, and that when they do seem to exhibit human emotions that it is just an automatic reaction coming from instinct."Oh, that's just animal instinct," they say, as if instinct is just some sort of base component of a lesser species. Instinct is the higher, the spiritual intelligence of the animal. We people are estranged from this intelligence because of the unnatural way in which we have become accustomed to living.

 Dogs don't have a front brain, even though they would probably like one because they are always trying to communicate verbally with humans, who are mostly too dense to interpret dog-language even after hundreds of years of dog/human interaction. Animals respond emotionally all of the time. Because there is no analytical function to analyze a response before expressing it, there is no delay between experience and expression. When you do something that an animal does not like, that hurts or threatens it, it will immediately let you know. There is no social filter analyzing if it would be impolite to, say, try and bite your ankle after you just stepped on its paw trying to go around it in the hallway. There is no part of the animal mind that is invested in trying to convince other parts that is is imagining things, hallucinating, or overreacting. For that reason they are more in direct contact with reality and more present on the physical plane, than we are.

 Anyone that has owned a dog like a Border Collie or Australian Shepherd knows that they smile from ear to ear when they are happy. The joy emanating from them at these times is so palpable that it is impossible to escape the notice of even the most emotionally oblivious of us.  That's why they have dog therapy (for humans) as a private therapy and in institutions now. Dogs are full of warmth and love, which is why we cannot resist a puppy, and why dog lovers will go the extra mile for the care and protection of dogs. Dog lovers don't just love dogs, they adore them, idolize them; a form of idolatry that marketing execs in turn, adore.




I could probably write a book about how sensitive my dog (if she was a dog) Josie was, because she made it almost to age 15 before she went to wherever dogs go for an afterlife. I've never tried to contact her since she passed to the other side, seeing as I think that everyone is busy after they die, busier than they were while alive. I don't want to hold her back. We had many adventures, both in the physical world and in supernatural places. 

These kids, the ones that picked her out for me from the litter at their dad's house, knew that this dog was meant for me and persisted in trying to get me to take her up until it was practically too late  I was really their mother's friend; the parents were divorced and the kids went back and forth between the two homes. They named the puppy Josie Kane right away, and I never did find out where they came up with that, but it was a good name for her, because she was an outlaw, like Josey Wales, and raised a lot of Cain to the point where, that by the time she came to live with me, she was about to be put down as an uncontrollable and dangerous animal. My grandmother Josephine's nickname was Josie, and I'd liked the Josey Wales movie with Clint Eastwood, so, though I admired the kid's talent for dog-naming, I still had no interest in taking the puppy.

When I finally did take her, she was recovering from being shot by (most likely) the North Carolina department of Animal Control near Drexel, N.C. The gunshot passed clean between the bones in her foreleg, damaging some soft tissue, but coming out the other side without severing any tendons or shattering any bones. This was just one of the amazing feats of providence that rained on Josie Kane before six months of life had passed. She'd also been nicked, if not downright hit by cars a few times, all the while wracking up large vet bills. She'd been gone several times for a week or so and thought dead, only to make it back all dinged up and in need of medical attention.
So, when she came limping back this last time, the kid's mom was none too thrilled about having to take her to the vet again. She'd had it with the dog, saying that they couldn't afford any more vet bills, and as soon as the bandages came off she was going to the pound, which for a dog at that time, in this area, was a death- row sentence. 

Josie was six months old when I finally took her home. She was in some kind of stupor for at least the first three months, which I attributed to PTSD, just like humans when they go through extreme trauma.
She was wild-acting, almost like a feral dog, and related to strangers with a hair-trigger viciousness that seemed too scary to be considered protective. She tried to bite several people and did bite me during the "get acquainted" period. My neighbors said that I had my work cut out for me, and that I'd probably end up having to have her put down anyway. She could not be stopped from chasing wildlife, cars, kids on bikes, people walking in the park, etc. etc. She had to be on a short leash at all times when out of the house, which made it hard to try and voice command train her, the preferred method of the civilized dog world. You have to give a dog some measure of freedom in order to allow her to perform the desired task and be rewarded or given affection for it.

Eventually, I figured out that my puppy was blind: her beautiful, shockingly clear blue eyes, were pretty much devoid of sight, except for a small patch of brown in the corner of her right eye, which I think gave her some sort of muddy, peripheral vision out of that one eye. She could at least see shapes moving in that one area. See, the people who had had her did not know that she couldn't see, they thought that she was "near-sighted." They said it was a common birth defect of the breed, and since she was a mix, I couldn't tell which breed they were referring to. After awhile I began to piece together her history and it became clear, that she had adapted to being sightless by tagging along closely behind  neighborhood dogs as they went about their daily wandering (no one had fenced yards there), and then eventually they'd lose her, or she'd lose them, get lost and get hit by a car trying to cross the street, or wander into some one's yard and not be able to get out and then she'd have the animal cops called on her when she barked at whoever approached her. A bad pattern.

About the first three months or so that I spent with Josie, I took her everywhere. I even took her to work with me, and for some reason the State of North Carolina had no problem with this. Often, out of the corner of my eye, I'd see another similar dog  padding around in tandem with her. Although once, when I left Josie outside of a gas station/convenience store to go inside and pay, I saw the other dog trotting down the aisles amongst the dry-roasted peanuts, Little Debbie snack cakes and chewing gum. That dog looked similar in stature to Josie, seemed to be a she, and was a slightly different, shaggier breed, and black and white, not caramel colored and white, like my girl. Later, when I saw the kid's mom again, I mentioned the spirit-dog. She said that I was describing Sadie, Josie's mother, who was more Australian Shepherd, and she'd died shortly after the pups were born, getting hit by a car out there in the boondocks where they'd all been born. I figured that the mother had stuck around a little extra to make sure that the most vulnerable of her children had someone looking out for her for awhile longer.

She came in with a large quantity of life force. She had a strong survival instinct; it was that which called out to me that day when it was pronounced that she was going to the pound. She wanted to live and she deserved it. She earned it. Once, when she was still pretty young, maybe 9 months old, and I had her sufficiently socialized to where we could go out in public, I ran into Cliff, the kid's dad, who'd originally had all of the puppies. Josie went wild and out-of-control when she "saw" him, recognizing, probably the first human she'd had contact with in her life. He mocked me, saying: "You got that one; that was the stupidest one in the whole litter."
The next time I saw his kids, I asked them if Josie was the stupidest puppy of all the puppies. They said, No, when they had all of the little puppies out in the backyard in a tepee at their dad's place, it collapsed on all of the tiny puppies, and Josie was the only one who'd dug her way under and out. My dog.

Because she was not sighted, Josie developed her other senses more acutely, like hearing and smell. I know that she could see into the spirit world because I watched her do it many times.  Here are two incidences that stand out as stories about the way animals can interface with the mysterious world that we say is 'supernatural,' but which seems to just be another part of their natural world.

Once during a very cold winter up in the Rockies; I went to sleep with Josie on the bed. I fell asleep, and then was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of her barking, growling and thrashing around from her place at the foot of the bed. I was laying on my side, and the first thing that I saw when I opened my eyes was a huge, curved and sharp rooster spur going past, just inches from my face. I was so frightened that I could not scream or make a sound, but did muster the reflexes to pull my face away and roll to the other side and off of the bed. There I knelt and continued to watch the entire, larger-than-life rooster strut steadily on its way across to the other side of the room and out through the wall into the chilly night. It wasn't hostile toward us or anything, it just seemed to be taking a walk through the room; maybe it did that every night, I don't know. I wouldn't have noticed, had my dog not sounded the alarm. This wasn't a dream or an out-of-body experience. I was in my body with Josie, who was in her body, the whole time. We were not in the ordinary world, though, but possibly somewhere in-between normal reality and the dream-world. I'm not sure exactly how it all works, due to the limitations of a human body and a human understanding of the time/space continuum. That's the part of human consciousness that wishes you could trade your mind with a dog's every once in awhile.

Again, another cold winter night up in the Rockies. I went to sleep, but before I drifted off, I get that feeling that I sometimes get that it will not be an ordinary night, that I will have some sort of unusual dream state, or out-of-body experience. I think that I was not asleep for too long, when something grabbed me by the ankles, the invisible ankles and yanked me out of my body. I have compared it to having a blanket pulled out from under you, except that all of the blankets and my precious human body remained on the bed, while I, or what I have grown accustomed to knowing as "me" during my regular existence, was standing off to the side of the foot of the bed, bracing itself for a struggle with an invisible something. Whatever it was seemed to have arms and legs. It would grab me and fling me into the wall or ceiling, or slam me into furniture and so on. There was no pain because I didn't have a physical body. It was more like wrestling force against force, or registering waves of an impact, although there was, again, no mass to absorb impact. This is why I now think that all "spiritual warfare" is a test of wills, warring consciousnesses struggling with each other.  

At first, Josie chased us around, popping up and yipping, growling, as a good dog will do, trying to get in-between her human and the attacker. Eventually, though, she just hunkered down and tried to track the action with her blind eyes - cocking her head side to side, up and down, all the while making little quizzical throat sounds as dogs sometimes do.

She probably settled in because she didn't smell any fear coming from me - no endocrine glands to secrete hormonal activity while I was disembodied. The 'fight' wasn't really scary to me, well a little at first until I got my confidence up. It seemed like a contest, like something was just challenging me, wanting me to show it what I had. Not that it was friendly; it just didn't feel dangerous as I didn't have a body for it to harm. What I really learned from this interaction, was that without a physical body, 'I' was much stronger, bigger and could access more force than the quotidian 'me'. And my dog, Josie, could see me in that way, too, because she embodied the ineffable force we call 'dog.'*


Addendum to this story:

A Bit of Testimony*

I became a born-again Christian at the end of 2012, beginning of 2013, in large part because of my many supernatural experiences, which I was just too dense to "get" for almost my entire life up until recently, in 2015. I stupidly thought that spiritual warfare occurred between two beings; I thought that "I" was fighting the out-of-body attacker. I no longer believe in practicing astral travel, depth psychology, reincarnation, astrology, numerology or anything of that nature, except as devices of satan and the dark side. Yes, I believe in a literal satan/lucifer/devil and I don't care if the world thinks that I am crazy, stupid, etc. My beliefs are based on my own experiences and the experience of salvation as offered and given to me by Jesus Christ. Astral travel is powered by demons, who want you cut loose in their spiritual worlds (the lower heavens) so they can destroy you physically, mentally and spiritually. I, (and my dog) have only been protected from demonic malice and shenanigans by the Lord, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit that takes up residence and indwells in those who call upon the Lord; that is where the glory goes, and it is that which has saved me from destruction, death and from being lost forever spiritually, countless times, and countless other times that I don't even know about. May God bless anyone reading this and may you find the Truth of God, soon, before your time is up.