Dreams

This began many months ago when a coworker said that anything you see in a dream while your pregnant about your baby will come true. While I'm educated enough to understand this is totally absurd, the part of my brain saturated with pregnancy hormones totally fell for it. I've been fighting the hormonal part of my brain with logic, which doesn't work very well because you can't reason with hormones. This was made worse by a dream a few months back where I was visiting my baby in the NICU. Even though he was hooked up to all sorts of machines, I felt a sense of optimism and knew he was going to be okay. But, even in this dream I didn't SEE him. It continued to bother me that I was never seeing him as an infant. I've had dreams of interacting with older children who somehow I knew were my children. I would wake up wondering if these were adopted kids. My mind would wander into dark places, led there by the PTSD left behind by IF. Our original goal was to have a baby. Then it became to get pregnant. Then it became to get pregnant and stay pregnant. And then when all that happened it transitioned into having a healthy baby, but the staying pregnant part was always in the forefront. Hormonal me became terrified that if I didn't have a dream about holding my baby boy, that it was because I would never hold him alive. And thus, I'm afraid that he won't come into this world healthy, screaming, pink...alive.

Then last night I dreamed that I was looking into the bathroom mirror at my big pregnant belly. I kept sucking it in so that it looked flat and little like before the pregnancy. It would be completely gone, and then I'd let it out and there it was again, big and round. Earlier in the week I also dreamed I was pregnant and was refusing to put myself in danger because of it. This morning I realized that those were the first times I had dreams about being pregnant, and saw my belly. I never had a dream before getting pregnant about being pregnant, and it's taken until 32 weeks to see my belly in a dream. Though the lack of dreams, I'm still pregnant with a healthy baby boy.

The logical side took over, and the hormonal side has more or less agreed that if I was able to get this far without having a dream that incorporated my pregnant belly, that I can also have a healthy, living baby without dreaming about it first. I'm really hoping this logical side remains dominant, because I want to fantasize about life here with my baby instead of worrying that I'll come home empty handed. And of course, in the end, I just want to come home with my little mister in my arms, happy and healthy.