Teeny Tiny Dock

Sure, I can resize the dock from it's upper and lower limits using either the dock system preferences or from within the dock itself. The thing is, by doing this there is a set limit to how big or small you can make to dock appear. Even if I use the system preferences to set it to it's smallest size, it's still not as small as it is once waking from sleep. The only thing that is different, is that I am actually using "sleep" a lot more often- I used to just shut my machine down. Right now I'd say the super-tiny dock appears 100% of the time after waking from sleep; from a normal start-up cycle it always goes back to normal.