A big family breeds horses on their hilltop farm. They have their own distinctive breed, and each child has bred its own line within it. They're proud of the lineage.

An alpha mare called Goldie leads the herd--a tall palomino. She broke her leg and still limps a bit but is expected to make a full recovery. I see her from far across the pasture and am riveted. She's so beautiful. And not just by horse standards. I want to date her.

I dare not admit that to my host family--that my attraction isn't just esthetic but sexual. Ashamed of hiding my motives from the other humans, but...

At last I slip into the hilltop corral when the family's off on errands. Goldie seems very human in her reactions, even her posture--she strolls around on her hind legs. And what legs! Longer than any horse here--human proportions though not at all human shaped.

Her blonde coat's so short & smooth it's like bare suntanned skin... maybe it IS. She seems more and more a human-horse blend...

Her upright pose shows off her cunt. But she seems matter-of-fact about her nudity, just friendly and polite--I'm just a human guest of her owners, not a stallion to flirt with. Maybe she'd see cross-species sex as just as perverse as my human hosts.

So I hide my crush from Goldie herself, too.

Now she shifts more--into a centaur. Mutation! And she keeps changing, to my eyes at least. Can't the family see she's no ordinary mare?

Her followers in the herd are stubbier, a mountain breed of ponies, mostly dark-blondes and browns, though with palomino tendencies from Goldie. But they don't seem to manifest human abilities or otherwise transform.

Though some of the herd have tiger genes! Striped, fluid kitten-foals. I wash one, and put her in the sunlight to dry. Why? Puzzle even myself. But some plan behind it. Play with the kits, hoping to tame the big cat. Wander through rooms with sliding glass doors... thin sun.

The dad of this farm-family is eager to take me out riding; wants me to try Blackie, a stocky, tough little mountain-climber. I agree to be polite, but feel uncomfortable thinking of even the ponies as mere transport now--mere animals. Goldie turned them to peers for me, I guess.

The ranch family takes me to visit a small national park nearby... here in Japan. We camp in a farm-valley; wooded hills above.

I go hiking alone. Fields at first. Strawberry plants. No fruit yet, just yellow and white flowers.

Spot a wild horse. They live in the mountain forests here. Not talked about, but numerous. And gracile as deer. Delicate, leggy, more beautiful than the tame horses, maybe even Goldie. Wow. I've been looking for love in the wrong herd!

I enter the wood, following the mare. A buzzing--oh, foresters clearing out brush with chainsaws. Wrecking the wildwood, or maintaining it? Unclear. Wait, the brush is some kind of crop--it's planted in countour lines around the hillslopes, with support-strings like the ones for bean vines. Look weedy and wild--I don't recognize--tiny flowers, dry stalks.

The wild mare and I veer left away from their racket. Past their noise-island, it's lovely, peaceful country. I like Japan.

Train tracks curve left too. We walk down a valley. Low ridge blocks it ahead. How does water get through? And the train?!

Question answered! Tunnel on the right. Not long--can see light through. But I don't want to risk walking through. I go left, over a little pass. Find a lake--a little one I always saw only from afar before. Swimmers, boats. Scenic: a big cliff over the beach.

The wild mare leads me up the bluff and sidles right to the edge of the cliff. She peers over warily, then... turns human. Well, ish. Like Goldie--biped, leggy, sexy. But not gold--dark gray, like a line drawing etched in antique silver. So beautiful I'm stunned--the moment inexplicably magical.

But I'm scared of the cliff-edge, and even when I sit and scuttle over, I can't force myself right to the edge and look down.

Later, I meet my dad and get a ride back out with him. Talk about what I saw, the transcendent beauty of the mare/lady/etching I saw up the Pass. But I can't explain it. Call it a 'pictograph' for lack of a better word.

My dad scoffs "Wild beauty hiding up that tame valley? Cliffs and horses? And," he adds, "Smell that sewage-stink!"

"Now wait" I say. "You can't blame that on nature. The river's clean." True. The sewage is field runoff in roadside ditches, NOT reaching the river--they drain back to the sewage plant in town. Which we're nearing. Parking lots. Back in the city again, sigh...

I want to be back with Goldie. Or better yet, the silver-gray mare.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Goldie the alpha mare: Goldie Hawn. I just saw her early film Shampoo. She plays a ditzy but likable hippie. I think she means sexiness plus heart--but not necessarily brains.
• Wild forest horses: hiding or naturally camouflaged? Just read Al Young's Ask Me Now--on a family with one daughter so invisible she fakes her own abduction just to get noticed!
  
• Magical silver-gray mare: I suspect a pun on grimoire! [medieval spellbook]. I think the silver woods-mare means shamanic dreams themselves--Jungian synchronicity, ESP, magic--all that nondreamers deny dreams can do. And that seems to lure me even more than sex and warmth, in the form of Goldie. The dream declares my allegiance--to something, someone, daytime denies.
• My dad: a devout scientist and ESP skeptic who himself had psychic dreams (appalling example: The Murders).
• Dad says the river from the magic-woods stinks: he claimed ESP was superstitious nonsense. While he had it.
• River's clean, the sewage is really from farms & ranches: "Science & tech are what's fulla shit"? Or at least, the problem's not in nature. Not, at least, in my nature!

I dreamed repeatedly of Goldie Hawn associated with equines and magic, notably in Hunt of the Unicorn. That dream was psychic: it had multiple echoes of Goldie Hawn's film Protocols--which I saw on TV after the dream, not before.

I spent the mid-1980s fighting a rigidly scientific upbringing that rejected my actual experience of predictive and telepathic dreams. As slow & painful to undo as any other parental fundamentalism! My dreams used unicorns, I suspect, because philosophers use them as a symbol of something possible but in our world nonexistent. While I was learning that my whole family had traits that majority thinking branded not just contingently nonexistent, but impossible.

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Today I'm startled how this dream anticipates My Little Pony's mythology; Goldie anticipates Princess Celestia, the tall and slender goddess of the sun, daytime, and practicality (though Goldie has hints of Applejack too--a palomino blonde farmgirl), while the dark-silver wild mare anticipates Princess Luna, goddess of the moon, night, and dreams. While the first MLP kids' show had debuted in 1986, I hadn't seen it and knew nothing of it. Certainly that first version, designed for very young kids, didn't show these goddesses in sexy anthropomorphized forms. Plenty of fan art has since 2010 or so... but in 1987?

And yet the parallels are there. I fell in love with the Mare in the Moon, the Lady of Dreams!

Maybe MLP's creator Lauren Faust and I both tapped into an archetype, that's all. Mare-goddesses go back a long way. Look up Epona--the source of our word pony.

And unicorns? Or their human equivalents--psychics and other fraudulent, nonexistent, impossible people? Well, as Twilight Sparkle, currently the world's best-known unicorn, might put it: we're here, we're queer (and not merely sexually queer) and not going away.

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