With Visions of Wild Geese Honking in Her Head

Dana is a source of une­nend­ing amaze­ment to me. This morn­ing when she woke up we had the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion:

Me: “Dana, did you have any dreams last night?”
Dana (in a lit­tle 19-month-old just-woke-up voice): “Dream?”
Me: “Dreams are the pic­tures you see when you’re sleep­ing and your eyes are closed.”
Dana: “Goose.”
Me: “You had a dream about a goose?”
Dana: “Ya.”
Me: “What did the goose do in your dream?”
Dana: “Honk honk.”

I was melt­ing.

I had been try­ing to get her to under­stand the con­cept of dreams off and on for a few weeks now, and while she’s always seemed inter­est­ed she’s nev­er actu­al­ly answered my ques­tion with any­thing oth­er than “ya”.

In case you’re skep­ti­cal, I’m pret­ty sure she under­stood my ques­tion and did actu­al­ly have a dream about a goose. She has­n’t seen a goose in weeks (not even in her pic­ture books). If one was on her mind it arrived there some­how oth­er than a recent real-world expe­ri­ence.

Besides which, she told mom­my the same sto­ry, “Dream. Goose. Honk honk.” when we went to get mom­my up a few min­utes lat­er.