Dreams are a Wildworld

I am usually quite tired after a hard day at work, but tonight I am even more tired than I usually am.
That's because I was awakened in the wee hours of the morning by a weird dream, and I couldn't get back to sleep very easily. No sooner had I finally conked out again when my alarm went off anyway, and I had to begin the "snooze button" ritual.
All in all I could have used a lot more sleep.

In the dream I was at my older brother's place and we were all playing with their new puppy, this cute little milk-breathed thing. Cuter than a little sack of hamburgers it was!
Thing is, their existing dog, which was this big Irish Setter sort of beast (Like Clifford from the kid's books) was not equally impressed with the puppy. (In reality, they do have a dog, but it's just a little Shi Tzu, so where this big red dog came from I have no idea).
Anyhoo, Big Red was severely jealous of all the attention being given to this new puppy (understandable) and so my brother's wife Laura was constantly scolding the larger dog.... are you getting the picture?
Big Red would capitalize on every opportunity to harass the puppy.
This intense monitoring of the larger dog's desire to eat or maim the puppy was a full-time affair and (horrors)... somehow in the dream all of a sudden I became in charge of the scenario.
I was left alone with these two dogs. Everyone had gone out and the maintenance of Big Red was my responsibility.

In real life I abhor the needs of dogs. Like they always have to be taken for walks and stuff like that. I much prefer cats. They just sleep, and occasionally vomit.
So, eschewing my duties and seeking verisimilitude even in my dreams, I promptly fell asleep on the couch.
In a sort of semi-wakeful state I could see that Big Red was watching me intently, to see if I had really fallen asleep. He was literally salivating at the possibility of pestering the poor helpless puppy with impunity.
It's hard to describe, but I could see him eyeing me, and yet I myself was sleeping.
Just to be sure I was down for the count before he started in on his shenanigans, Big Red sauntered over to me and commenced bonking me on the nose with his paw.... BONK BONK BONK!
And the weirdest thing is that in my dream the big dog was actually saying "DING DING DING!" as he did this.
The words were coming out of his dog-mouth and I could hear them and the bonking grew so intense that I actually woke up in real life, in my bed, at about 5 a.m. this morning!
The dream was over, but so was my sleep!
I got out of bed and walked around a bit, and then finally settled back in.

About 20 minutes later, still fully awake but in the darkness, I heard a scratching and pecking sound on the ledge of my bedroom window. I'm on the 14th floor and the urban pigeons roost there. I don't know what they do in those wee hours but they do tend to make quite a racket. They hop around and stuff or have pigeon-sex or something. They were just beyond, behind the curtain. My eyes were closed.
Next thing I know I hear a TAP TAP TAP....... TAP TAP TAP.
It's my cat Jack, who has jumped up there and is tapping away at the birds from an open area where the curtains are not quite closed. His claws are clicking away at the glass.
The sound was so similar to what I had been hearing in my dream, this "DING DING DING" and always in triplets like that, that I immediately realized Jack had probably been up there previously [like say, just before 5 a.m.?] and been tapping away exactly as he was now doing.

Dreary-eyed at work today I thought of something interesting though.
The dream I had dreamed ENDED with the tapping, the bonking, the dinging!
It did not BEGIN with it.
Hence, I began to randomly extrapolate and theorize on the significance of that.

If, in fact, Jack's tapping away at the birds on the ledge "inspired" my dream [which I think is quite likely] it follows then that the processes in my sleeping brain actually created a story to FIT that impetus.
Remarkably, a plausible story involving antecedents was invented [perhaps even in a split second, in other words, while the real-world tapping was in progress] when the only thing that had any valid basis for existence was the CONCLUSION of the story.

What I am theorizing here is that if the tapping on the glass was the motive force through which my dream evolved, then it formed itself in retrospect.
Faced with an ending, it sought a beginning.
And I find that, quite frankly, amazing.
I would love to speak with someone like Steven Pinker about this.

Now, having said all of this, the weirdness of my dream may not involve my cat and the sex-pigeons at all.
It may have more to do with the fact that just before I went to bed last night I ate an entire Octomom-Style Family-Size can of Trader Joe's Lentil Soup.
That's gotta do some brain damage, no?

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