Content note: short piece that could be upsetting to people who have experienced pregnancy loss
I dreamt last night that I had given birth at 16 weeks. It was a terrible dream. I gave birth in my childhood home in the kitchen with my family present. The baby came out and was miraculously alive, but was so small and underdeveloped. It was moving around as we wrapped it in a blanket and rushed it off to the hospital to see if it could be placed in the NICU. Holding the baby in my hands was so visceral and awful as I worried it wasn’t going to live much longer. There was blood everywhere.
I used to have frequent pregnancy nightmares a few years ago. They weren’t about me. They were about one of my sisters. The dreams were usually the same: my sister had had a baby, born severely disabled, and I wasn’t allowed to see it. My sister would come over for dinners and would leave the baby at home. If I asked her about the baby, she would pretend it didn’t exist. Sometimes in a dream, she would have more than one baby I was prevented from meeting. These were unsettling dreams and made me deeply sad.
Later, I found out that my real-life sister (not the dream version) had been trying to have children during that period of dreaming so heavily about her and the unknown child. My sister has not been able to get pregnant so far. I think something in me was having these dreams for her as she moved through fertility unknowns.
I expect I might have a few more nightmares in the next five months. The more my pregnancy progresses, the more afraid I am that something will happen to the baby. I’ll be posting a longer pregnancy update soon (more fears, symptoms, feelings) but for now felt like writing out a very quick post about this dream!