Sleeping Through the Night

We got our dog Leonard from Atlanta Lab Rescue in July 2014.  He was a terribly anxious dog when we got him but time and Prozac helped.  He settled into our household pretty well and life with Leonard had been mostly uneventful.  Then the last time we took him to the vet, she suggested that we try to taper him off the fluoxetine (generic for Prozac) and see how he did.  So we took him down to every other day, and then we missed a couple of doses and figured we'd just see how he was altogether off of it.

He's always been terrified of storms, but unless the weather is bad, he's slept downstairs in the living room by himself.  Bullwinkle, our previous dog, couldn't climb the stairs in our house, but Leonard could.  When we first got him and didn't completely know what to expect, we'd barricaded the stairs with a piece of plywood that we had to step over and that mostly kept Leonard downstairs.  But then after we stopped the fluoxetine, he started waking up at night at 1:30 or 2 a.m. almost every night, and either hurtling himself over the barricade and coming upstairs, or barking until one of us got up.  We restarted the fluoxetine, but it didn't seem to really help that much.  For the last couple of months, almost every night either Tom or I has spent much if not all of the night on the sofa, keeping Leonard company.

This was not going to work in the long run, so on Thursday we had a session with a dog trainer, recommended by Intown Animal Hospital.  We told him about Leonard and what we knew about his life before we got him and what has happened in our household, and stopping the Prozac and the waking at night and how now we were taking turns keeping him from keeping everyone awake all night.  The trainer listened to all this and then looked at us and said, "Why can't he go upstairs?"

Now there was not any particularly good reason why he couldn't go upstairs; when we'd first gotten him, we hadn't known how he would behave in the house, so it made sense then, maybe, but not so much now.  He does eat loose paper that he finds on the floor, but it's been almost two years and that's probably long enough even for us to get the papers picked up.  So night before last I took away the barricade and called him to come upstairs.  He explored a little but ended up falling asleep downstairs as usual.  I put his smaller bed in the family room upstairs where I thought a dog might want to sleep, and I went to bed.

Around 2 a.m. he came upstairs and jumped on our bed.  I got him off the bed, and he settled down pretty quickly in the hallway.  He woke up a couple of times and after wandering around a little quickly went back to sleep, on the floor in the hall between our and Iain's rooms.  That's where he was, sound asleep, when I got up yesterday morning.

Last night I moved the bed to the hall where he'd slept the night before, but I think he stayed downstairs all night.  He didn't make a sound.