“Isn’t a mare a female horse?”  I asked my dad when I was eight.

 

“Yep.”  He hid behind his morning newspaper. He did that when he didn’t want me to bother him with questions.

 

“It doesn’t make any sense then.”

 

“What doesn’t?”

 

“Nightmares.”

 

“You’ve been having nightmares?”

 

“No. I’ve just been wondering about them.”

 

He lowered his newspaper. “What do you mean?”

 

“Maybe they are dark horses.”

 

“What?”

 

“Nightmares.”  I sighed in exasperation.

 

“Nightmares are bad dreams,” he said.

 

“But why do they call them nightmares?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Maybe they are more than that. Maybe they are real. Maybe they gallop through your room at night and since you are too sleepy to wake up, it scares you and when you do wake up you can’t figure out what happened and so you think you’ve had a bad dream.”

 

“Eat your breakfast, Joyce.”

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