Haunting Our Haunts, Confronting Our Black Dogs

Ever since he was about two years old, my son has been talking about a black dog that he sees but nobody else sees. Knowing what I do about the mythology of faerie dogs, I've always listened to his ideas on this black dog. As he's grown, it's become clear that the black dog has entered his dreams, where it terrifies him by coming up to him, with no mouth, and trying to speak, but with a muffled murmur all that comes out as a sound.

 What's fascinating to me is that, recently, our daughter, who is now just two years old herself, has picked up her brother's belief in a frightening black dog. She will talk about how the black dog that's "creepy" and "scary" is just outside the window, though of course I see nothing of it.I decided to confront the black dog, through my children, this evening. I explained to my son that dreams are like books that we write for ourselves to read while we sleep, or like movies of our own creation, and how the black dog is actually a part of himself, a kind of thin shadow that his brain makes within itself. I'm not sure how much of what I said was grasped by my son, but the idea of a dream as an internal movie of our own creation did sink in.

So, my son drew a picture of what the black dog of our family mythology looks like when it frightens him. I took that drawing, scanned it into the computer, and put it into animated form with movements that my son could control himself. He moved the "skeleton" of the black dog that had frightened him, and he began to smile and have fun with it.

And then, I asked my son to give the black dog a mouth, and to speak for it. After all, the black dog in his dreams had been a creation of his mind. He could own the black dog now, and make it speak on the computer screen. I have uploaded the movie that resulted, and it can be seen from my profile at irregulartimes.gather.com.

This exercise was a step in my son's growth, and the development of his ability to establish a meaningful narrative for his own life. After seeing what he accomplished with this effort, it occurs to me that his discovery provides a lesson for adults as well, in our relationship with mythology.

When we become frightened by mythological creations, it is a sign that we are not owners of our own culture, and that our mythology has escaped our control. To master the fear, we need to become masters of it, and reshape our nightmares into stories of humor, joy and positive power. We need to take the black dogs that haunt us, and haunt them, possessing them with our own voices, which is what they have been waiting for in the first place.