The Pinto

I am watching an orange dog run along the road. It wants to follow its owners who are driving away in their 4WD but they have told him to stay where he is with their son who has stopped on the side of the road with his skateboard.
The dog watches his owners; he wrestles against the pull to follow them but loses out and tears up the road after them.
I want to yell out so the people will stop driving away, they do not realise the dog is chasing them up the road. But I make no sound, for after all I am asleep.

The dog turns right, off the road and past that 3 storey apartment the gay men live in, and runs into the RSPCA. I follow and suddenly there are many timber sheds in front of me, the boards grey are grey from weathering, the roofs are low and sagging.

The place is full of lines of stalls and in the stalls are horses.
My nose wrinkles from the smell of urine-soaked straw. There is not much sound, just the quiet rustle of hooves in that straw.
From where I am, hovering above the ground, I can see there is any type of horse variation you could ask for.
Big chestnut thoroughbreds that have trouble keeping on their weight.
Little bustling bay ponies that have trouble keeping off their weight.
Black hacks and grey geldings.
Steel coloured arabs that will whiten with age.
All the horses I have ever known are also there.
Trimmer with his colic.
Big gracious Munjara, not good enough for neither the track nor the dressage ring.
Biting black Mickey soured from being a small pony destined to spend his life with silly children. I was the last in along line of children; by the time he reached me he knew every trick in the book. I was squashed, bitten, trampled, bucked off, reared-off and head-butted flat to the ground. For a 24 year-old pony he was amazingly athletic.
There’s little Mouse, his dapples still as pretty as they were thirty years ago. How I longed to be the sort of girl who would have a pony like Mouse! But I was the sort of girl who had Trojan, a sensible bay with a star and one white sock, his ringbone on that sock sending him lame the day before we were due for Pony Club or a Gymkhana. How bitterly disappointed I was so many times, harness gleaming, boots shining, horse sparkling with not a sign of dust, limping his way to the truck then limping his way back up to the top paddock, unusable. Through the tears of a ten year old I would have jerked his rope and hated him then hated my mother then hated myself, for not being the sort of girl who deserved a pony like Mouse.
Then there is the skewbald.
It is the perfect horse for me. 14.3, old enough to be nimble but not so old as to be tired and jaded of humans. Perfectly marked with brown and white, not too much of either colour. His rump is round and smooth and he looks around from where he is tethered. He knows he is for me.

You know, this dream was a long time ago, I’ve just found it in the computer. At least a couple of years ago but I can still remember the dream so vividly, I picked it up from the second paragraph – except for how it ends!