Pregnancy Dreams

In the past, I've often had those odd anxiety dreams in which I have a critter or critters to care for, and I realize that I've left it/them unfed for days, or lost in the snow, or out in the sun, or whatever.

Once I began raising fancy rats, those dreams began to always be about baby rats, usually a whole passel of 'em. I guess baby rats are good metaphors for whatever helpless creature you can think of, as they are tiny, warm, pink, wriggly, and squeepy. And also very helpless.

So as you may well guess, I have begun having those kinds of dreams again.

I dreamed that I was leaving my old pre-marriage apartment, and I realized that there was a mama hooded rat bringing her young down to the lobby one by one. And apparently someone else's babies too, as there were several different developmental stages of babies in the pile. I was worried that they were too exposed, and people would step on them and kick them out into the cold without even seeing them. So I was trying to pick up as many of them as possible, and trying to find which apartment(s) they were coming from. Then I realized that there was more than one mama rat carrying babies down those stairs, and from different apartments, and I was never going to be able to return them all or get them safe.

I did also dream a literal baby dream, in which the baby was born but a month or two too early--a small baby, but looking like a proper baby. It was a girl, and I was trying to get her to nurse, but she hadn't been able to eat in days and we had to be transported to the emergency room by paramedics.

Now, the odd thing about these dreams, is that my husband and my sister have both been having them, too. Both of them dreamed about the baby being a little weird blobby/alien kind of thing that they had to save or resuscitate. (Of course, my husband had initially squashed his dream-nub unknowingly under a wire basket.)

There seems to be a theme with everyone of the baby coming out too soon, and another theme of it being unformed and sort of alien. I have actually read discussions (in my pre-baby life) about how a lot of society's anxiety about the pre-born seems cathexed on aliens, and our images of aliens often resemble our imaginings or nightmares of what fetuses look like. If you're H.R. Giger, it's definitely a nightmare--but just as definitely a metaphor (if you think what Giger's aliens do.).

My own mother told me that she felt weird and kind of icky about her babies when she knew they were in that little blobby alien stage. (Though she didn't use those words.) I am actually happy that my dream-babies have so far taken the form of baby rats and actual babies: creatures I find familiar and cute. I'm actually okay with the weirdness and biological-ness of this whole process, for some reason. At some point in the past 10 years I made peace with my own corporeality/ physicality (and therefore necessarily imperfection and ugliness), and I think that's a big part of it.

Plus, as silly as this sounds, I find I've been identifying greatly with those mama rats I used to care for. They were so cute and funny when pregnant--little furry water balloons with legs when they got huge. And they were so unselfconscious about their physical needs, lying splayed on their backs with paws all akimbo to cool themselves as their little metabolisms sped up. And I loved the little translucent warm babies--I could tell which ones needed to be rotated in towards the feeding zone, because the ones that were already full of milk had a visible white patch in their little see-through bellies.

Presumably mine won't be exactly like that.