Pregnancy Dreams
Are you having crazy dreams during your pregnancy? You’re not alone. Pregnancy affects our whole body, all our systems, floods us with new hormones, and even changes our senses. Is it any wonder it also affects our minds?
Pregnant people often report experiencing vivid, intense, crazy dreams. Not only do we have strange dreams during pregnancy, but people often have greater dream recall. We have whacky dreams, and we remember them in graphic detail too.
There is even a pattern to the types of dreams many people have at different stages of pregnancy. There are more nuances and subtle shifts than this, but we can crudely break the types of dreams that most people have into pregnancy trimesters.
First trimester dreams
Many people have hazy pregnancy dreams in the early months. This might reflect our state of mind at this stage, but the dreams are often fuzzy, harder to recall, but leave us with a sense of something beginning, like a new adventure or a budding opportunity. Sometimes there is some tension around this, like the kind nervous-excitement you might feel before embarking on a new experience that is as intimidating as it is exciting. These tend to be fragments of dreams, hard to remember the actual substance, but they leave a strong feeling of a shifting wind that can linger all day.
Second trimester dreams
For many people, the second trimester brings about a turn towards colourful, epic-narrative dreams with lots of emotion. Picture big, blockbuster movies with huge casts, romance, quests, intrigue, drama, and big adventure. These dreams might bring together people from completely different eras in your life, or real people mixed in with fictional characters. These dreams might be inspiring, or scary, or thrilling. Sometimes second trimester dreams are graphically erotic, with romantic stories and sexy scenes. Sometimes they’re deeply psychological, featuring conversations with family members or childhood friends, old bosses or teachers, and new revelations about old motives or life events. Sometimes they’re pure fantasy, with fairytale style adventures, or mythical journeys.
People report that these dreams are often highly detailed, vivid, clear, realistic, and very intense. Even if you don’t normally remember your dreams, you might remember them during this phase of pregnancy.
Third trimester dreams
It is quite common to start shifting to stress dreams as the birth approaches. These dreams can range from mildly tense to downright terrifying. Many people report having pregnancy nightmares in the third trimester. Dreams about being lost or trapped are normal. Many people report having dreams that they gave birth, but instead of a baby they birthed an egg, or a doll, or a gecko. Another popular late pregnancy dream topic is that the birth has already gone by, but you can’t remember where you left the baby or when you last saw it. This dream can become the panicked kind where you run around searching but never finding, feeling increasingly desperate and aware of the clock ticking.
Another late pregnancy nocturnal theme is that the baby is not a normal baby. I heard one person describe a dream in which her baby looked transparent and two-dimensional–and she felt overwhelming fear at being responsible for such a fragile looking thing. And another pregnant person told me about a dream in which the baby was normal around everyone else, but when she picked it up it would start morphing into a horror-movie creature.
What Causes Pregnancy Dreams?
There are several converging factors that likely create the conditions that produce these weird dreams.
The first is hormones. Rising levels of progesterone and oxytocin, which both get higher throughout pregnancy, are most likely the main hormonal culprits for all those crazy dreams. These hormones are probably the primary cause, but they combine with the following other factors to create a perfect storm for the kind of intense, detailed dreams we get during pregnancy.
The second cause is frequent night waking. It is normal to wake up often when pregnant, due to physical discomfort, a full bladder, or the baby kicking. This results in more disturbances during REM sleep, which is the phase of sleep associated with dreaming. If we get woken up during REM sleep, we are more likely to remember what we were just dreaming, which leads to higher incidence of dream recall.
Pregnancy insomnia also contributes to weird dreams, since we spend longer in the shallower stages of sleep, sometimes drifting in and out of REM sleep, so that our waking mind and dreaming mind might be influencing each other. In this state, our daytime thoughts, worries, or concerns can infuse our dream stories, coming together in a way that can be eerily realistic. Some people wake up unsure whether they dreamed something or whether it actually happened. These are called vivid dreams, and they can be quite disconcerting.
Is There Any Benefit To Pregnancy Dreams?
One theory about these pregnancy dreams is that they cause us to experience a wide range of emotions, taking us through all the feels. When we feel any emotion, the feeling is accompanied by a chemical reaction–the production of hormones–that travels to our baby. The baby gets the hormonal footprint of whatever we’re feeling, which helps develop different parts of the baby’s brain. It is healthy and useful for the baby to experience a wide range of human emotions as this supports optimal brain development. This could be one of the reasons it is common to have such weird and crazy dreams at this stage of pregnancy.
Another hypothesis is that dreams act as a kind of therapy. There is an obvious benefit to working our own stuff out before the baby arrives–a kind of psychological housecleaning. So this could be one of the purposes of pregnancy dreams. In fact, sometimes we don’t even realise we have a certain fear or anxiety until our pregnancy dreams bring it to the forefront, which might give us the opportunity to deal with it before we give birth.
If you are concerned that your dreams will stress your baby, there is no need to worry. While it is not optimal for a pregnant mother to be chronically affected by stress or worries, it is fine and normal to experience a range of emotions–a spectrum with stress, fear, and negativity on one side, and happiness, joy, and contentment on the other. Babies prioritise growing different parts of their brains according to the hormonal echoes of your emotions, so that they are born better suited for the world you inhabit. For example, if your life is nothing but luxury and leisure, your baby would focus on that part of the brain. But if you were pregnant during a war or apocalypse, your baby would send more energy to the survival part of their brain.
It is not in the baby’s best survival interest to be exclusively moulded for only one type of environment. A baby’s odds are better if they are more adaptive to multiple possibilities. So your dreams might be the insurance policy, filling in any gaps in your daily emotional range. This way, no matter how singularly stressful or how perfectly peaceful your life is, your baby will have the benefit of exposure to more than just that. They will be suited to a range of environments, with all parts of their brain ready for whatever world they are born into. Your crazy, detailed, epic pregnancy dreams might be nature’s way of making sure we give our baby the gift of adaptability and resilience: the gift of all the feels.
Stephanie Ondrack lives in East Van with her partner, 4 kids, 4 chickens, and 5 cats. She has been with The Childbearing Society since 2003.