Horse Dreams

I can tell I'm really missing my horse when I start having weird riding dreams. I love the ones where my horse starts to fly... Is that the best 8-year-old-girl fantasy or what?

Last night's version started out like a pretty standard horse-show anxiety dream...driving to a show somewhere, hauling a two-horse trailer, running late. That feeling of rushing to tack up, rushing to get on, rushing to warm up, is one I dread but seem doomed to repeat, in dreams and in life.

I pulled up at the show grounds...and it turned out not to be, strictly speaking, a horse show. Some people where riding horses. But my friend A., an awesome dressage rider, was mounted on a fine long-horned cow, preparing to ride the Novice B test.

The little pony-clubbers were doing some kind of complicated relay with flags on long sticks, on sturdy but muddy sheep.

When I pulled down the ramp on the trailer, inside I found, not my mare J., but a zebroid (zebra-horse cross). These really do exist (see photo), though I've never heard of people riding them...they have been used for packing loads and hauling wagons.



So I tacked her up. She was fatter than the fattest pony, cross and opinionated. She wasn't wearing any shoes and she simply refused to accept the bit. This being a dream, I was still able to finish and mount up, but I was nervous that someone would notice there was no bit.

When we rode up to the warm-up ring, the only comment from a show official was to ask me why I wasn't wearing a hairnet. (Since I've started riding and sometimes competing, I've found myself buying a lot of weird gear, but for some reason it's owning hairnets that seems strangest to me. I think it's because the only other time I ever wore them was when I scraped plates at my school cafeteria as my work-study job back in 10th grade.)

When the class started, the Z. and I found ourselves in the ring with a couple of really nice-looking horses and one camel. The judges asked for a canter, and the camel took off at speed. My Z. followed close behind, and then in convenient dream fashion, the arena fence disappeared and we found ourselves galloping across a grassy plain, being left further and further behind by the camel....

There's no resolution to this dream, of course. I woke disappointed and hope that the next one I have will reunite me with J. rather than some other hoofed animal.