The Same Dream About A Yellow Door For Nineteen Years, And Then I Bought The House

The dream started when I was seven. I am now forty-one.

It is not a nightmare. In the dream I am walking up a path toward a yellow front door. There is a bay window on the left and a dead plant in a pot on the right, and the third paving slab rocks.

I never get to the door. That is the whole dream. I have had it, I would estimate, two hundred times.

I drew it once, in a therapy session in my twenties, and the therapist said something reasonable about doors and futures and my father, and I stopped going because it cost forty pounds an hour to be told about doors.

Last year we bought a house.

The photographs on the listing show a white door, because the door was white. The bay window is there. The pot is not; the garden was a mess of gravel.

I did not recognise it. I want to be very clear about that. I did not walk in going "aha". We bought it because it was in the catchment area and because the survey was not a horror story.

On completion day I got out of the car with the keys in my hand and I put my hand on the gate and I could not move my legs.

The third slab rocks.

I have not been able to put weight on that slab since. I step over it, every day, like a superstitious idiot, and my wife has stopped commenting.

We stripped the door in the spring, because it was flaking. Under the white, there are four layers. The bottom layer, the original, on bare wood, is yellow.

The dream stopped the night we moved in. Nineteen years. Two hundred times. It has not come once since.

I have thought a great deal about what it means, and I have got nowhere, and I have decided it does not need to mean anything.

I painted the door yellow in June. My wife thought it was because I liked yellow. I let her think that for about a week and then I told her everything, in the kitchen, badly, and she listened all the way to the end without laughing.

She said: "So the dream was just directions?"

I have no better answer than that. I have thought of nothing better in a year.