Pregnancy Dreams

Originally published January 16, 2019

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I always wonder why people claim to dream so vividly when they’re pregnant. To me, dreams are the same as before. But then I’ve always had very vivid, in depth dreams my whole life. Less often now I’m older, but I still get those crazy, memorable dreams with intricate story lines and characters. I have written a LOT of stories based on those dreams (though I’ve only ever finished one, I’ll post it here).

As soon as I got pregnant, however, the dreams seemed to stop if anything. Occasionally they were the same dreams I once got, but they occurred less regularly. I was too tired to dream, or I had insomnia and could barely sleep all night. I kept thinking to myself, “Where are my crazy pregnancy dreams?” I love dreams, I love dreaming and the ideas I can have. Why did I suddenly miss out on all the fun?

I didn’t know fun was the opposite of what pregnancy dreams were.

What you should know about me and my dreams is that I can control them. I’m what’s called a lucid dreamer. Lucid dreamers are aware they are dreaming, know it’s a dream, and in my case, can sometimes control their dreams. There are some lucid dreamers that use their dreams to do anything. I’m not usually like that, I mostly play out the dream in my mind, go along with the dream through its course.

But if the dream turns too scary, I stop it from going on. I can stop the dream entirely without waking up, and just que the next dream. Sometimes I alter the dream itself, give myself the ability to get out of the situation (suddenly I’m able to fly and can just fly off, or I become all powerful and whatever is harming me doesn’t want to harm me anymore). It’s a skill I’ve known since I was very little, because of a hard time in my life where my dreams controlled me.

It was back when I was tiny, seven or eight years old. I’d just moved from the Pilbara to down near Perth. I had a new school and missed my old friends terribly. I was being bullied, and everything was different. I wasn’t handling the life change very well, and that reflected itself in my dreams.

I had constant nightmares, and they were always the same. Fire. People burning in fire, dying, me dying, my friends dying, my family dying. I could never escape and it was horrible. An MA+ rated dream for a tiny child who had to live it as if it were real every night for months. I was terrified of falling asleep, because the fire would come. I wasn’t a vivid dreamer back then.

I also had another dream back then, one I’d had recurring for years and years since I was very little. It was always the same. My parents were having a party around one side of the house one day. I’d walk around the house, looking for my old dog Harley, who would be around the far side where he used to go to the toilet in real life. In the dream, I’d round the corner to see him doing his business on the lawn. Only, at the far end of the grass, past him, was some huge, scary animal.

This animal could be anything, and it changed with every dream. A rhino, a lion, a dinosaur. It was always big and scary and dangerous. I’d start screaming at Harley to run, begging him to come with me so we could run together. The huge monster would get closer and closer, and just as it was about to reach Harley and me, I’d wake up.

This dream was recurrent through all my childhood, and after a while I started to realise mid-dream that it was the same dream as before. I’d leave the party and round the corner wondering what monster would be waiting for me this time. Little did I know that was the beginning of lucid dream, and that most people didn’t have this realisation in their sleep. Soon, I could face the monster without fear, because I knew I’d wake up before it every reached Harley or me.

I think it was around the time of the fire dreams that I came to realise this in the lucid dreams. After what seemed like months and months of terrible nightmares and horrible sleeps, I started to lucid dream in my fire dreams as well. I could never control it, but sometimes I knew I was dreaming and was able to get through the dreams with a little more courage and a little less fear.

Until one day, I stopped the dream completely. I didn’t wake up, but instead the next dream began, and this time it wasn’t one filled with flames.

It was a continuation of those fire dreams, though. A teacher led me along a pathway in the bush, a ridge of sorts. She was talking calmly the whole time, and it was a very vivid dream. I once remembered what she said, but I’ve long forgotten now. Running parallel to us and our path on the ridge, was a little stream. On the banks of the stream, sometimes caught for a moment, other times floating in the current, were charred and blackened corpses.

I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t lucid dreaming either. This dream was peaceful, sad but happy. The corpses were being carried on their way to a peace of sorts, a heaven I guess (though I had no knowledge of heaven back then). They were my friends and family, and I’d never see them again, but I was okay with that now. That’s what the teacher was telling me, that we had to be at peace with the losses we suffered, that we had to be understanding of these lives that were lost. They’d lived out their stories, and now they were gone to us, but the stream would carry them further on their path, to a place we couldn’t follow.

Eventually the ridge ended, or we just stopped, I don’t remember. And we watched the stream carry on in the distance. It was a sad dream, but I never thought of it as a nightmare. And I never had another nightmare about fire after that.

Perhaps it was my fears after losing my friends that caused the strife. Or perhaps it was the fact that Harley was passing around that time, the cancer finally getting the best of him. I’m not sure, and I can’t remember, but those nightmares taught me an important lesson.

Sometimes, we have to take a different path to those we love most, whether in life or death, but we also have to accept that they have their own path to follow, and we have to hope that path leads them to a place of peace and happiness.

It was during these hard times that I also learnt to lucid dream, though it would be a decade before I finally realised it was an unusual skill for people to have. But I now possessed that skill, and could use it to skip forwards to the next dream if one came to be too much (or too boring in some cases), or I could do little things here are there in the dream to make it more fun or interesting (or just easier when I couldn’t be bothered).

Other than that, I rarely controlled my dreams, as I often want to see where they’ll lead in case they can be made into an interesting story when I wake up. But I’m always aware that I’m dreaming, even in the worst of nightmares.

Not now. Now, I get these dreams that I’m calling my pregnancy dreams, because they aren’t like my dreams before I was pregnant. I’m not aware in them like usual. It just doesn’t occur to me ever that I’m dreaming whilst I’m in the dream. I can’t be a lucid dreamer when I’m stuck in these dreams.

And these dreams are nightmares.

It’s like the entire dream is run by emotions. Which is normal, emotions always seem stronger when you’re dreaming. Fear is life threatening and happiness is the best feeling you’ve ever felt. But in these dreams the emotion is uncontrollably strong and always negative. I can’t remind myself this is a dream, and I’m just dreaming this feeling and don’t really feel it. It consumes me, the strongest feeling I’ve ever encountered.

I wake up physically sick and hurting, and it lasts all day. It’s like when you’re really upset over something, and you’ve been super angry or crying for ages (or needing to cry, at least), and there’s this pain in your chest that is very much physical and there, and your stomach feels tied up in knots. Well that’s what I’m like when I wake up from these dreams.

They don’t usually have much in common. And I haven’t had that many of them. But just last night I had another, and it’s finally been enough for me to realise there’s a pattern in them.

There are always emotions, I’m always angry and hurt and out of control. It’s always the fault of a family member, last time it was my sister, and this time my grandmother. And at some point, I’m always trying to run away but can’t escape. I’m usually trying to run away from my family as they chase me down, but I know that it’s more the emotions I felt around them that I want to outrun more.

It’s horrible. Absolutely horrible.

Of course, I have nothing against my sister or grandma in the waking world. My sister and I rarely fight now days, we’ve reached an age of maturity where we know we can support each other and that’s better than anything a fight could achieve. But I still woke up angry and hurt, the feelings of the dream, both physical and emotional, leaking over into reality.

Another thing all these dreams have in common is my inability to handle the amount of emotions I feel. I can’t run away or escape, so my thoughts turn dark. The dream with my sister, I woke up almost in tears because I couldn’t commit suicide without hurting my baby. When I woke up, I realised it was a dream, and that I didn’t need to go to such drastic lengths to escape the pain. Waking up was a way of escaping. But I didn’t know that in the dream.

In this dream, I wasn’t pregnant. So when I wanted to commit suicide, it wasn’t a problem. Only that thought was when I started to lucid dream, because a part of me knew I was pregnant and worried about my baby. I made the dream change, because I was going to get an ultrasound to see if the baby had survived the drama before I continued the suicidal track.

I never got that far, because the instant the dream became lucid (I realised there was a fault in it and that I was dreaming, and was therefore able to control it), I could wake up. And obviously I made myself wake up, because there was no way I was hanging around in that nightmare.

I’m not sure what other people dream of in their ‘pregnancy’ dreams, but mine are horrible. I want my old dreams back, where I think up amazing storylines and crazy characters. Where everything is magnified, but I can control the way I think and feel. Once, sleep was my biggest fear each night. But once I could lucid dream, sleep became my escape from reality into the only world I could control. There’s a strength that comes from dreaming, from being the master to your own imaginary world. And now I’ve lost that strength once again, reverting to the times of the fires.

23 more weeks, give or take, and then I can get my old dreams back. People say pregnancy is an amazing time of your life, a time you should cherish and that they wish they were pregnant again and miss it. I sometimes wonder in what way their symptoms differed to mine. Because my skin isn’t glowing (it’s covered in pimples and cold sores and my eyes have bags as black as night), I’m still waiting for the second trimester energy, or at least for the sick feeling to go away, and when I finally can get to sleep, I have nightmares that wake me feeling worse than when I went to bed.