My Daughter And I Have Been Having The Same Dream, And She Is Four

The dream is a field with a five-bar gate. There is a horse in the field, standing side-on, and it will not look at you no matter where you stand.

I have had it since I was about six. It comes maybe twice a year. It is not frightening. It is annoying, in the specific way that dreams are annoying, because I want the horse to look at me and it will not.

I have never described it to anybody except my wife, once, years ago, in the way you tell your partner a boring dream over breakfast and they forgive you for it.

Three weeks ago my daughter, who is four, came into the kitchen and said, "Daddy, the horse still won't look."

I said, very carefully, "What horse?"

She said, "In the field. With the gate with the bars. I stand on the bottom bar and he still won't look."

I have stood on the bottom bar. In the dream. Every time. For thirty-odd years.

I did not say anything. I gave her toast. My hands were not entirely mine.

Over the last three weeks I have asked her, lightly, a handful of times, being extremely careful not to lead her, and she has added: the gate is cold. The horse is brown but "not shiny". And there is a bird on the fence that "does not do anything".

There is a bird on the fence. It does not do anything. It has never once done anything, and I have looked at it in that dream for three decades, waiting for it to do something, and it never has.

My wife thinks I have talked in my sleep, or muttered something at breakfast years ago that lodged in a small brain and grew. That is a real possibility and I hold on to it, some nights, with both hands.

But she has never heard me mention a bird.

Last week my daughter said, at bath time, without any prompting: "I think he's waiting for somebody else."

I said, "The horse?"

She said, "Yes. Not us."

And she went back to her boat.