50/50 Exercise #32: “I have always wondered if…”

I have always wondered if people who are going insane know that they’re going insane. That’s a question that’s kept me up nights for a lot of years. Sometimes late at night I watch for signs of instability in myself, but I’m not sure if I’ll recognize them.

I have always wondered if I snore, so last weekend, I set up a video camera in my bedroom to see if I could catch myself in the act. When I woke up in the morning to review the tape, I discovered something much more interesting than whether I snore. I found out that while I sleep, my dog moves the books around on the bookshelves. I wouldn’t have believed it, except I’ve send the evidence on the videotape. There he is, standing on his hind legs, one paw braced against a shelf, the other drawing the books toward him. His head was blocking the camera angle, so I couldn’t see exactly how he holds onto them to put them back in different places.

I started to wonder if there’s some kind of message that he’s trying to tell me with the rearrangement of the books. So I took a Sharpie marker, and I wrote a number on the top of each of my books, on the edges of the pages. It was a blue Sharpie, because I can’t find the black one. I suspect the dog has something to do with its disappearance. Anyway, the next morning, I figured out which books were out of order. I pulled a few of them off the shelves and stacked them on my desk.

Obviously, my dog doesn’t possess the dexterity to write any kind of message in my books, so I knew that I should be looking for a coded communication either in the titles of the books he chooses to move, or maybe in the pattern of where he moves them to. I opened the first book in the stack, a House and Garden guide to interior design from 2002. I leafed through the pages. Nothing obvious struck me. But I left the book open to a spread of pages with only a few photographs, and as I turned away to look for the next displaced book, I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

When I looked right at the page, I couldn’t see it. But if I focused my eyes somewhere else with the book still remaining in my field of vision, I saw a shape formed by the pattern of words and letters and spaces on the page. What I saw looked like my dog when he was much younger, running very quickly from left to right. No, I didn’t actually see him moving. (I’m not crazy.) But the shape of the strong bunched muscles of his haunches and his raked-back ears suggested rapid movement. When I looked directly at that area of the page, I couldn’t see any of the detail I’m describing here. But as soon as I looked somewhere else nearby, there it was again.

I went to the next book—ironically, a bestseller on obedience training for dogs, written by some monks in upstate New York or somewhere like that. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I stopped searching for an obvious message. Instead, I held the book in front of me with the spine resting on the oak veneer of the desk. I let it fall open. Then I focused on a spot a few inches to the right of the open book. Nothing. I shifted my gaze to the left. There! Staring back at me from the random field of gray type, wearing a look of astonishment, was my own face.

I have always wondered if there are forces that science has failed to discover, to measure, and to explain. I wonder, for example, what happens to time when we sleep? Does it slow down? Does it speed up? Who has been writing numbers on the edges of my books? Is my dog playing tricks on me again?

I have always wondered if my dog keeps my secrets, or if he communicates them to the other neighborhood dogs. I will have to buy more video cameras. There is important research that needs to be done in this area.

I have always wondered if I snore, so next weekend I will set up a video camera to see if I can catch myself in the act.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick