Why does my dock keep moving back to my other monitor?

I have a larger, external monitor connected to my MacBook Pro and have arranged it such that the dock is in the external monitor (via System Preferences > Displays > Arrangement, by dragging the white bar to the larger screen). This works fine, except for the fact that every now and then, the dock will suddenly shift back to my MacBook screen, but when I open up Displays to change this back, the white bar is still on the external monitor. So I have to drag it to the smaller screen, and then drag it back to the external monitor. It's a minor issue, obviously, but I've noticed that it has been happening more and more frequently and it's getting quite annoying. Perhaps there's something I've been doing unintentionally for this to happen? I'm using Mavericks, 10.9.5.