The Same Dream Since I Was Six, And Then My Daughter Drew It

I have had the same dream since I was six. Not often — maybe three times a year, sometimes a gap of two years, and then twice in a week.

It is never a nightmare in the normal sense. Nothing chases me. Nothing hurts. It is a low ceiling, close enough to touch, the colour of skimmed milk. A smell like holding coins in a hot hand. And the flat certainty that a decision is being made about me by people who are not unkind, and who are not going to consult me, the way adults decide things over a child's head at a hospital.

I never see anyone. I am always aware of them being to my left, out of the field of view, and I am always aware that turning my head is not something I am able to do, and — this is what I have never managed to explain to a therapist without her writing something down — it does not feel like paralysis. It feels like manners. Like turning my head would be rude, and I have understood that, and I have agreed.

I told my wife about it years ago. It became a joke, in the way that things become jokes in a marriage. The Coin Dream.

Two months ago our daughter, who is five, brought me a drawing to put on the fridge.

Low ceiling. A bed or table with a stick figure on it. Two shapes to the left, drawn tall and thin, with lines coming down from them like sleeves. And in the corner, in the way children label things, she had written PENNY SMELL in her own spelling, because she asks me to spell things and then does it her own way anyway.

I asked her, as lightly as I have ever asked anything, where she had seen it.

She said: "When I go to the quiet room. You go too. You always look at the ceiling."

I have not told my wife. That is the honest, cowardly part of this account.

I have started sleeping in our daughter's room on the nights she says she is going to the quiet room, and she says it the way you would say you have a dentist appointment, and I lie there awake and hold her hand and I have never once been awake at the moment she stops squeezing back.