Pregnancy Dreams

Pregnancy can do some really crazy things to your brain. I really feel like the bigger my belly gets the smaller my brain becomes! I feel like I'm doing well to remember my name these days. I would normally consider myself to be mentally organized and "on top" of things, but when I'm pregnant, particularly toward the end, I become forgetful and so many things begin to slip through my fingers. I'm looking forward not only to having my body back (or at least some resemblance of it) again but also my mind!

Another interesting thing about pregnancy's effects on the mind is the impact on your dreams. I seem to have many more vivid dreams while pregnant. I could recount interesting dreams all day, but I'll just keep it to this week's recurring dream.

Over the past week alone, I've had about three dreams with the same theme. I have a baby (a girl) and then quickly go back to living my life, seemingly incapable of consistently remembering that I have a newborn who is relying on me. I suddenly remember and feel tremendous guilt over having not nursed the baby in many hours. In the last of such dreams I went to the baby (a very tiny, frail thing) and tried to nurse her, but my milk had already pretty much dried up due to the fact that I wasn't nursing much at all. I vowed to nurse her at least every two hours like clockwork until my milk returned. I was so mad at myself and felt like such a terrible mother. I even remembered in my dream that I had had those other dreams about neglecting my baby and had woken up feeling bad about it and saying, "I would never do that!" and then feeling even more guilt that I had, in fact, done that very thing. How silly, huh?

This is all coming from someone who never left her firstborn for so much as a quick trip to the grocery store until she was four months old.

I've thought about many reasons why I might dream such things. Most likely, I figure I must have some anxiety about establishing a good nursing relationship, as it was a struggle with Eliana (due to true medical cause). We overcame the difficulties, however, and I thanked God for every day He so graciously enabled me to provide for my daughter in that way.

One more interesting dream tidbit is that whenever any of my baby-related dreams involve having a girl, she's always deformed in some way or another. Sometimes she's insanely tiny (I'm talking hold-in-the-palm-of-your-hand tiny) or has a terribly misshapen head or distorted face, etc. I can't recall any of my "boy" dreams involving any problems or abnormalities. I have no idea what that means, but I find it interesting that I dream that so consistently.

Any dream analysts out there? :)