I've read somewhere that those who do not dream are those who have no problems, an unconscious with nothing to say. However, I have issues like the next guy, for example the recent situation with Rachel.

In this dream, I'm in a carriage complete with coachman and two black horses like an Emily Dickinson poem. It's awful and welcoming at the same time and I get inside the carriage as myself, but not myself as a young boy or as a man. I don't see my reflection but I know it's me. I only say this because I've told my single dream to others. They asked of the central character. In their dreams every entity was some version of them and the focal individual was usually in control. Like this friend of mine in the office told me how in her dreams her mom always tells her what to do, but she doesn't say anything and does whatever is asked. Recently, a third person has been showing up in her dreams and takes up the fight against her mother. She's convinced that her inner child is standing up to her mom for her. That's not the case for me.

Anyway, I get in the carriage and we start driving on one of those old dusty roads with fissures and shallows from where mud and water was disturbed and dried. I feel the springs of the black leather bench pressing into me and I wonder why this is the most uncomfortable seat I've ever occupied in my life. There are trees in the yellow-green of new growth framing the little drive which is capped by blue sky. Birds twitter, insects buzz and the plants make a sound like my mother's washing machine with the clear door that let me watch the clothes spin in their bubbly soup.

When Rachel and I bought our first house, I wanted a washer that loaded from the side with a glass door. I told her I had one when I was young and since Rachel and I planned to have kids sometime, I wanted them to take the great comfort that I did by looking at that scurrying dish of the future. Rachel would have none of it. A washer is a washer is a washer. I've often wondered if this should have signaled me that something was not right.

Rachel’s the kind of woman who has a vision in her head of how her house was intended to look. Everything that I had collected over the years, except for the electronics, were first put in a spare bedroom, then the attic, and finally sold at a garage sale after we discovered that if we wanted to have children we might have to consider extensive medical advice.

That's why we've been fighting. She wants to have children, but doesn't want to risk her health to get pregnant exploring the options that are out there, even though the doctor assured her the risks are minimal. I want kids, but I'd be okay with not having them. I just want to decide one way or the other. Night after night, week after week, without any assistance we try and Rachel cries when her period comes. I just want to know if I am going to be a father or not. I don't think that’s so much to ask.

So I'm in this carriage riding on the bumpy road, nature around us, not another soul in sight and then the coachman swings down from his seat, grabs hold of the door, and slides into the compartment across from me. When he sits down I must give him a funny look because he guarantees that these horses don't need to be driven or lead. He says, they always know where home is. He is a funny sort of man, a cross between Willy Wonka and Seinfield, but of course at the age I dreamed this it's very unlikely I'd seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Seinfeld because they were no more than a twinkle in someone's eye. I say he's funny because he chuckles at all his jokes, regardless if they are humorous or not and that makes me laugh. He seems so happy to simply be expressing whatever it is that's inside of him. We talk of what I suppose all travelers talk: weather, places we've been, and people we've met. This is strange because I tell the man stories of a past I certainly hadn't had. I remember this. I tell him I've met Superman and Hulk Hogan, or at least I think I did, that was surely something that would stick in a young boy's mind. He hoots nonsense and tell tales, giggles more. He seems like a friendly sort of man and I don't think much of his clothes. It seems at first he's wearing tattered pants and an old greasy, dog-eared hat. Then he’s wearing jockey gear, then a suit, then a black cape, and then a white dress. Why the clothes? I don't know. Every time he metamorphoses into a new costume, I recognize him not by his face or voice. It's like I know who he is on some deeper level, the same way I feel I know Rachel.

Rachel could walk into any room and I would feel her watching and listening without even seeing her. Rachel is not what you'd call beautiful nor is she plain, but rather somewhere in the middle. She has a normal sized body, straight blond hair, a pink pert mouth, and bright green eyes. When she wears something red, her eyes stand out transforming her from the average into someone slightly glamorous. Of course, Rachel hasn't been wearing a lot of red recently. She said she is in her mourning phase, though she simply does not reward or take care of herself in the manners she had always done. She used to dress up, do her hair and smile even if everyone else was down, but that was four miscarriages ago. Is four a large number? She says no. She says doctors don't know anything. She says it's all about the money. And I agree with her that medicine is big business, but I think even in industry there are several doctors out there with humanity who care about their patients. Especially, if the patient is memorable.

I told Rachel this once. I work as a case manager for foster children, placing difficult children in adopting families and foisting them out of the structure established for those who are unwanted, but doesn't quite live up to its side of the bargain. My job is to profile several clients and place them in prospective families. I generally have dozens of cases simultaneously, but it seems there's always some kid that sticks out in my mind that I make sure has a fighting chance. I want them to be a survivor instead of just another victim of the system that proclaims every life is valuable and every child should be taking care of, but lacks the resources and public support to adequately do so.

I tell Rachel that often I come across some young girl, tough and wise beyond her years who knows how to read people and situations in ways that most of us never develop. With this young girl I spend several good afternoons in discussion and at first she's evasive then boisterous. Eventually, I come to know her, like her a little, maybe even love her in the fatherly way that I glimpse inside myself. I explain to Rachel that we've got to get inside a doctor’s head, so when she or he goes home at night, he or she thinks about us and wonders what else can be done. Rachel tells me most people don't care like I care, especially those who make a lot of money.

Anyway, the guy in the carriage with me clutches his belly and pats his knee in merriment and we finally get to this large cemetery. We walk past headstone after headstone and since I'm a kid having this dream, though I don't feel like I'm a kid inside the dream, I have the sinking suspicion that we’re heading to a hole in the ground with my name on the gravestone which the guy is going to push me into. To seem nonchalant, I pick up a large walking stick to fight this guy off if I have to as we hike right across the gravestones. Marble polished rocks and stones aged with black mold and lichen are the scenery until we reach a miniature wrought iron gated plot. It's like a cemetery within a cemetery. These are marked not by massive phallic structures aiming towards the heavens, but with ones flush with the grass. As I think of the dream now, it looks like the burial ground in that thriller movie where a kid buries his cat and it comes back to kill him. However, in the dream the earth does not throb and a paw does not reach out clotted with mud.

My funny guide asks me what I think this is and I don't have an answer.

Now, he says, it's not what you think it is. It's something you need to know. Count how many there are.

I realize that the area has more vacancies than residents, so to speak, because there are only a handful of headstones, but the rest of the cemetery is already divided and subdivided into plotted regions for tiny coffins.

What is a miscarriage exactly, I asked Rachel after the first one and she said it was like a really heavy period, but clumpy with tissue. Instead of a bright red flow lessening into darker colors until it stopped, it consisted of strings of congealed scarlet floating in the toilet along with the blood. It included cramps and pain.

I tell her that’s disgusting. Rachel gets it in her head that she should tell me everything about women's reproduction, what to expect, what it looks like, how it changes, and the way it smells. She buys a few books about repeated miscarriages and getting pregnant, taking care of your body, and tells me things that I wish I had never heard. Sometimes when you're told something, even if you don't see it, you can't un-see it ever again. Those images of those words are forever inside your mind. And then almost grotesquely your mind fingers those ideas to torture you, punish you for your curiosity. It's like a dark little sign of hell.

Rachel's fourth miscarriage was perhaps our most devastating because it was unlike the others, which she only carried for a few weeks. The fourth one held strong for twenty-five weeks. We got to the hospital quickly after Rachel started cramping. At twenty-five weeks, it had fifty to eighty percent chance at survival, depending on a variety of factors, the doctor said, which he then outlined. When he said this to me in the private of the hall, I was cold. When they got it out of her, it was purple and blue and never took a single breath. Rachel wouldn't even touch it and I looked at it for a long time because it was so very small fitting in the palm of my hand like a dead little kitten. It curled up there in the box they had it in and then I remembered my only dream.

It's funny when you're a non-dreamer, people talk all the time about dreams, interpret dreams, read dream books, and pass judgment when I say I have none. But when I saw that fourth little thing that could have made me a father, a flicker of a memory like deja vu made me dizzy and I rushed into the hall, sat down with head in hands, closed my eyes and replayed what was forgotten. I was incapacitated by the images of a childhood nightscape.

I couldn't even kiss my wife and I couldn't touch her. We neglected one another, empty vessels of self blame. With this last one, several ounces of us died too. The dream gave me a manic hope and a notion that we still had another chance if we were willing to take it. If Rachel would try some of the doctor’s suggestions, even long-term bed rest for the pregnancy, I knew science had the power to help anyone in this predicament if they were willing. This fell on deaf ears and it isn't a man's place to tell his wife what she should or should not do with her body. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I never claimed to be a completely rational man. Working with unwanted children pulls the emotional part of yourself free and displays it there between you and the child you’re trying to help. The child might not see it, but you do. Your heart lying there between you both, spurting. It doesn't matter who you are.

In the dream the guy before the wee plots laughs and asks if I see four stones while touching my arm. As I'm sitting there in the hospital wing, I feel someone grabbing my arm and holding it safely like the way a mother does when she wants to tell you something that might hurt you but wants you to know it's okay, yet she hesitates for a moment only because she's not sure if you're ready to handle it and maybe she's not ready to see you handle it.

He grabs my arm and he says that if you can get through four, four deaths, the next one you can keep. He hands me a chocolate kiss in the silver bell shaped wrapper with the paper white flag on the top. I start to unwrap it because I never pass up candy, but he closes my fingers around the miniature chocolate and tells me to put it in my pocket.

I tell him no, it will melt into a big sticky mess. I explain that it happened before and I got in trouble.

No, he says, save it. Then we are in the carriage. He takes me back to wherever he found me. I go inside my house, which is not my house as a child and certainly not my house today, but is my house in that way unfamiliar objects are familiar in dreams.

My wife and I go home and she avoids me. She says she's done. She says she doesn't want to try anymore. I tell her my dream and she tells me that I don't have dreams, but I tell her that I remember one and that I had a second.

She laughs and says, a man with a dreamless life doesn't suddenly recall a childhood dream and then continue that dream, as an adult, years later.

She might be right, that maybe this baby business is making me a little crazy too. So I let it be, thinking maybe I imagined my two dreams. After all, how can a man never dream and then do? I go to work. I start new cases. Eventually Rachel and I start to make love again and we don't use protection because we stopped that years ago.

Then all of a sudden she's pregnant and she is worried because she expects every single day to lose it. Day after day goes by, her hopes building and she doesn't. And she goes past twenty-five weeks, and then twenty-nine weeks and then thirty-two. The little fetus works itself out at night. Rachel sleeps as mothers-to-be don't sleep during the dark hours when the creature decides to do somersaults. I place my hand on her belly, feel its fluttering movements, and I tell it my dreams, this new little thing that might come to be. I tell it the first dream and then I tell it the second dream. The dream I had the night after the fourth miscarriage.

The dream starts out with me leaving the carriage again and walking up and into my house and I go up to my room which is not my room and lay on my bed which is not my bed and pull out that tiny chocolate from my pocket. I hold it in my hand and feel it gently, but it doesn't seem to have melted as I thought it would. It's wiggling and pulsating as if bugs were inside. In a nightmare sort of way, I take the chocolate in my palm and begin to unwrap it just slightly to see what's inside. Every second that I'm doing this, I'm screaming in my head no don't because I'm afraid it is some gigantic roach spider destined to kill me and stick its poisonous prongs in my thumb and forefinger. I pull out the flag and peel down the slivers of silver. When I'm done, it's none of those things. Inside is a tiny little baby and the baby is crying and screeching on its first entrance into life.