Emily woke up in a panic. She couldn’t feel the baby moving anymore. She pressed on her stomach, each time pushing a little harder and a little further, hoping to feel the movement again. But there was nothing.
Moments before, she had felt the kicks in her stomach, so why was the baby still now? Was something wrong?
She sat bolt upright and stared at the wall opposite her bed blankly as it dawned on her that she was now awake. There were no kicks. There had been no baby. In the last eight hours, her subconscious had devised an entirely new life for her, and as she sat there, feeling empty, she longed for it back.
“Where has my baby gone?” Emily asked herself.
“The movement had felt so real; how could it possibly have been a dream?” she thought.
Emily’s grief over her lost child may have felt isolating, and it’s a feeling echoed by many women, especially on social media. A quick search on TikTok yields thousands of videos from women sharing eerily similar stories.
Some mentioned the same empty feeling; for others, it was the fear that the dream had a hidden meaning, and some felt confused over their sudden desire for children.
As Emily sat there, she started to wonder what the dream had meant. Did she want children now? Was her subconscious trying to convey something to her? Was a pregnancy test called for?
Matthew Bowes, a psychotherapist who specialises in dream interpretation, explains that there are several scientific explanations for why we dream about certain things.
“Most agree that dreams are a form of processing emotional experiences. When we are asleep, our prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for cognitive functions, is at rest. The limbic system, the area responsible for emotions, shows increased function of up to 30% during REM sleep.”
This is incredibly beneficial and a valuable way to heal from things that are emotionally distressing in our lives,” he says.
However, Mr Bowes explains that what we see while we are asleep isn’t always a literal representation of those emotions. “Quite often, we use metaphorical constructs to describe emotions so that these dreams can be an expression of a wish, or desire, or concerns, but they aren’t always literal. Pregnancy can be a symbol of growth.”
“So, ask yourself, ‘What is happening in your life that you want to give birth to? What feelings are you pregnant with?” He says.
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Daisy, a 22-year-old primary school teacher, often dreams about children, reflecting her daily experience of caring for them. Her desire for a family in the future further explains why she so frequently dreams about having a child, and yet she still finds it difficult to part from the baby she knows isn’t real.
“It’s like a part of me has been taken away. I can feel she is missing and there is nothing I can do,” she says.
She explains how vivid and memorable her dreams are as she picks out clothes for her daughter, goes through the process of giving birth, or holds the child in her arms.
“I had this whole dream and this whole life with this child while I was asleep, and then I woke up and realised that that baby does not exist.”
While Daisy’s dreams stem from a place of longing for a future she envisions, women like Sonya have had very different experiences. For Sonya, the dreams she had from a young age were not born from desire but from trauma, and were so extreme that they left her terrified of motherhood.
She was 15 when her distressing dreams started, and only after the birth of her son, 25 years later, did they stop. She dreamt of being pushed through a hospital corridor on the way to give birth, feeling like she was going to die. “It felt like the worst thing in the world was happening to me,” she says.
The dream was always the same and could happen as frequently as once a month. Sonya says, “It was really vivid and so scary that it made me think, God, I could never have a child because I cannot go through that.”
Sonya’s mother had a difficult pregnancy and birth with her, which Sonya said traumatised her when she was younger, hearing about her terrible experience.
Dr. Lindsay Browning, a chartered psychologist, neuroscientist and published author, explains that these recurring dreams could be a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as they are often linked to unresolved trauma. For Sonya, her dreams of childbirth reflected a deep fear tied to her mother’s traumatic pregnancy.
“Recurring dreams are dreams that people have repeatedly about a similar theme and with similar content. Often, recurring dreams tend to be negative in their content and are a hallmark of PTSD.
“In PTSD specifically, people will often have recurring dreams about the traumatic event, and we believe that dreaming about the trauma is the brain’s way of trying to come to terms with and process the traumatic event itself.” Says Dr. Browning.
Sonya was so impacted by these dreams that she put off having children for years and relied on IVF to conceive when she realised she couldn’t delay it any longer. “As much as the dream doesn’t sound much, the way it made me feel when I woke up, the panic and the stress, that awful feeling from just that small snippet that I can remember, made me feel so panicky I couldn’t imagine doing it in real life,” she says.
Dr. Browning and Matthew Bowes suggested that anyone struggling with distressing dreams and sleep issues should consider specialised therapy to reduce their impact or understand why they are experiencing them.
Dr. Browning also promoted Nightmare Rescripting Therapy, a step-by-step guide to rewriting recurring nightmares and making them more manageable. It can be done alone at home without any previous knowledge of the topic or experience, and is recommended by many sleep experts.
For Daisy and Sonya, these dreams can be explained by experts, and while they can be distressing, they no longer have the same impact without the accompanying panic and worry about their meaning. For Emily, these dreams are less obvious, but she says she no longer minds them. “Weirdly, I kind of enjoy them, even though I wake up feeling sad, it’s nice to see what my life could be like,” she says.
