I slept fine for most of my two pregnancies — not too many 3 a.m. runs to the bathroom, and I was mostly comfortable with the help of an extra pillow or two. But boy, my dreams were vivid. I had sex dreams, animal dreams, near-nightmares, and a whole host of the kind of run-of-the-mill nonsensical dreams that have you waking up, thinking, “What was that all about?”
One, in particular, has stuck with me all these years. I was wading in a gently flowing river, holding an infant in my arms, as if showing my baby how to float. People were on the shore nearby. It felt almost biblical (mind you, I am in no way religious). And then, as if a record scratched somewhere on the soundtrack, the baby peed right in my face.
Back then, I took it as a sign that I was definitely having a boy — which would be proven wrong a few short months later when I gave birth. It still makes me laugh, though. And it was a great lesson to not take these wacky messages from the recesses of your mind all that seriously.
Ask any pregnant woman what she’s been dreaming about, and she’ll say something similar. Pregnancy makes your brain do funny things.
Why pregnancy dreams are so vivid
The conditions of pregnancy are (ahem) fertile ground for weird dreams. First, there’s your new hormones. And then, your new sleep patterns. As Dr. William Sears put it on his website: “You dream differently sleeping while pregnant, because you sleep differently while you’re pregnant.”
Sometimes they are pretty literal
“I had a very vivid dream, about a week before my first was born, that her name would be Miriam Grace,” says Holly Harding, a mother of two in Chico, California. At the time, she didn’t know her baby’s gender, and while the name Miriam Grace was on the shortlist, it was far from a shoe-in. “She was born a few days later, and her name was not in dispute by us after my very telling dream.”
Sometimes the meaning might not come until later
For Christina Dupont, a mother of two in Ohio, she dreamed about an early conversation with her firstborn — a boy. “I asked my son what he wanted to be named. He said, ‘Elephant.’ I laughed and said, ‘That’s not a name. … Come on, what name do you want?’ He got excited and said, ‘Yes it is! You asked me what name I wanted, and I told you Elephant!’”
Needless to say, his name is not Elephant, but the dream did come back to her recently. “I asked him last year, since he was going to start high school, how he wanted people to think of him. He said ‘Big but not mean, like a gentle giant …”
Sometimes they have little to do with pregnancy at all
Lisa Ling Fu, a mother of three outside of Portland, Oregon, is still perplexed by a pregnancy dream she had 20 years ago. “I was sitting under a lush blueberry tree when a rhinoceros charged toward me,” says Fu. “I scrambled up the tree and was very frightened. The rhino stopped at the base of the tree and said to me, ‘Why are you so scared? I just want to make some jam.’”
Some common themes
That feeling — of being confused, of fear — is a common through line for pregnancy dreams. Pregnant women dream about giving birth to little animals or other inanimate objects, a not-so-veiled reference to impending childbirth. It’s also surprisingly normal to dream about sex, or one of your exes. And later in pregnancy, in particular, women have anxiety dreams — that they’ve dropped the baby or they’ve left the baby somewhere. (I still have that dream, actually.)
Are pregnancy dreams trying to tell you something?
Yes and no. I’ve heard stories about a woman who dreams she’s having twins — and lo and behold, on the sonogram, twins it is. But few dreams are so on the nose. According to Healthline, dreams serve a few primary functions — they may help us process emotional experiences (like pregnancy), help us practice responses to new experiences (like pregnancy and impending parenthood), help us sort the information we collect each day (about pregnancy), and reveal subconscious feelings (about, hello, pregnancy).
A little armchair dream analysis
Apparently, dreaming of water — swimming in it, standing in it, or, God forbid, drowning — is also pretty standard as far as pregnancy dreams go. One conceit is that you’re connecting with your unborn child, who is bathed in water inside of you. (To which I say, Okayyyyy). No word yet on what it means when your dream-child pees in your face, but I can attest that it’s one instance when my dreams did actually come true — I just had to wait for my son to be born.
