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Every dog owner has wondered what it is like to be inside a dog's head. But I have actually had that experience.

Over the holidays my son's school held a fund-raiser at a local bakery. All profits from that day's sales went to the school. To increase traffic, human volunteers dressed up in animal costumes and paraded around outside the bakery. (You know how it is. When you see someone dressed up in an animal suit, you just want to whip out your checkbook. The last thing you would do is cross the street to avoid the poor slob.)

I was volunteered for this operation ("We thought you would be perfect for public humiliation," one of the moms told me), and provided with a dog costume. It was a very good suit. The fur looked real, and the head, though oversized, was naturalistic. It seemed to be a husky or possibly a Samoyed. As soon as I slipped the enormous head over my own and peered out through the gauze eye windows, I felt different. And I don't just mean unable to breathe. No, I began to feel like a dog.

It was a slushy day, and it had begun to snow when I slunk out to my appointed post along Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I spent two hours on the corner, and in that period I went through a series of transformations.

First I was just a man in a dog suit. I imagined I was a cartoon dog. When cars went by I waved my hand in a friendly way, like the person in the Mickey Mouse suit at Disneyland. But that seemed mind-numbingly insipid, so I began to experiment with other modes of behavior. Like lifting a leg at the stop sign to make my mark.

Some people made me want to look away. They were cold and distant: cat people. Others filled me with alarm. I wanted to shout at them, repeatedly and insistently, as if there were some point to my bellowing. Don't ask me why, but, at all costs, I just had to keep them off my tiny strip of boulevard.

Other people seemed sympathetic. I whined when they passed me on the sidewalk, hoping they would pity me and take me home. I zeroed in on a family with only one child, a little boy about 6. I sensed a vacancy in their hearts, and I yearned to fill it. But they seemed unsure about adopting a 6-foot-one, bipedal malamute, and walked right on by.

Soon I grew tired of that and became the man who did not know he was a dog. The fact that I was in a dog suit was of no consequence to me. I pretended I was waiting for a bus, glancing at my paw-watch to check the time. I rocked on my heels and whistled a tune. When a car drove by too quickly and splashed slush onto my feet, I shook my paw at them as they sped away, laughing.

Then I became the man who awoke to find himself changed into a dog. I was like Gregor Samsa in the Franz Kafka story who was trapped in a large cockroach's body. Only I was a dog. I paced around frantically, pretending to pull my head off, only to discover it was my real head. It was a horror story, but no one showed the slightest sympathy. I waved at passersby, signaling that I needed help in the most urgent way. I even stepped into traffic a bit, as if I might stand in front of a car to get it to stop. People's expressions of delight quickly faded into uneasy stares.

But the metamorphosis deepened, and I became the most frightening thing of all: the man who really was a dog. All human perspective was now gone. I was a tall dog standing on its hind legs, teetering close to traffic. This was serious. I could bolt into an oncoming car, or nip a passerby in my confusion. I looked around me at the world of people—an orderly place for humans, but incomprehensible to me.

Soon, my coat blanketed with wet snow and my mask dampened inside from perspiration, I trudged back to the bakery, took off the dog's head, and felt the cool air rush to my slick human face. Things began making sense again. Business was booming: We raised $7,000 for the school from bread sales. But I felt changed by having been a dog. I now imagined that dogs in human society feel almost constant fear. I remembered my last thoughts on the boulevard: If I was a real dog, and I wasn't on a leash, then what did that mean? Was I lost, or somehow emancipated? If so, I was in deep trouble: alone in the city, confused by traffic, stimulated by my freedom but unsure of what to do with it. I appeared to be grinning, as dogs in danger do. But I was at my wit's end.

As a dog, I controlled nothing in my environment. I understood nothing. Everyone else seemed to have a direction for his or her behavior. I simply improvised, moment to moment. One wrong move and I was a dead dog. My only defense against all this confusion was to latch onto a human who could make sense of it and ingratiate myself to him. But who? Who? I put my head back on and howl into the falling snow.

Michael Finley lives and writes in St. Paul.