Day Eleven: Here a Baby, There a Baby, Everywhere a Baby Baby

I woke up this morning in a sweat, panicked. I was laying in some sort of strange, splayed position, indicating that I had been tossing and turning, and I had weird clothing lines imprinted on my skin where my clothes had twisted. It would appear that I had a nightmare, but it wasn't about dying, or going to class naked -- I had a dream I had a baby.

More specifically, I dreampt I had a baby that I overtly didn't want, but everyone around me tried to convince me I was excited. I remember being exhausted from constantly watching the baby, feeding it, playing with it, dressing it, and changing it. And I more distinctly remember a feeling of dread, because in my dream, I was pregnant, again, a week after my new baby was born. Although I understand this to be pretty impossible (I think, I'm not entirely positive about this), somehow, I was. And even more bizarre was the concept that still, everyone around me was elated. Here I was, with a fatherless (literally -- there was no father to this baby in my dream) baby, a second fatherless child on the way, and a feeling of being trapped that no one understood. No wonder I woke up panicked.

But my cold sweat upon waking wasn't purely a result of this one dream. In the past month, it is the second dream I've had of having a child. In my first dream, I was an overweight woman in a field full of Carnies (the kind who dress as clowns, not the overweight Wilson sister) who went into labor, and was ushered onto a large boat towards a city with buildings that echoed a small town in a quaint European country. There was a doctor with a handlebar moustache wearing a top hat and tails, who insisted that if I stay perfectly still, the baby would not come out.

After that dream, I woke up alone, wondering why my pants were gone. I kid you not. I was perfectly sober.

So it would appear that my panic and confusion after these two dreams is justified. I'm not a huge believer in dreams having some grand "meaning" behind them, that often times has nothing to do with the true subject of the dream. But with such frequency and vivid images in these dreams, I'm starting to wonder if there might be something going on here. I'm positive I'm not pregnant, so what could it be?

According to TheCuriousDreamer.com, dreaming about having a baby might either be bringing up images of a new beginning in one's life, or one's subconscious mind exploring what it might be like to have a baby. Since I'm pretty sure I don't have any desire right now to ponder what it would be like to have a baby, it makes sense that the meaning is the former. I have had new beginnings in my life recently, in many ways. A new job, new changes at said job, a new year, new goals, new activities, and new motivations. So maybe, there is something to this dream theory crap after all. But that brings up a new question: why do I always wake up feeling so anxious after my vivid baby dreams?

Maybe, I'm afraid I'll fail at my new endeavors, or that I won't be able to handle them. And in a sense, I feel that way when I'm awake too, as everyone does. But honestly, they are fleeting thoughts that hardly keep me up at night. I wonder about failing, but at most things I've undertaken recently, I feel confident I can succeed. I spend my time worrying about a huge plethora of things, but for some reason, none of them are the new experiences I've embarked upon in the past month. What am I so afraid of failing at? Am I afraid of failing at having babies? Maybe (and hopefully), the solution to my dreams is a lot simpler than that.

There are a lot of women at my job who are either pregnant, or have very young children. I imagine being surrounded by baby talk all the time would cause me to have dreams about babies, but there is more talk of weddings than babies. Why aren't I having dreams about weddings? I'm certainly not ready to get married, but I feel a lot less apprehension about weddings than I do about babies.

Maybe I won't ever figure it out, or maybe my next baby dream will give me some more insight to their cause when it comes along (although I honestly hope it won't). Until then, I'll just keep popping my birth control pills and being utterly content that I do not have a baby.