I dreamt I had a baby.

Last night, I dreamt I was a mother. A mother at the age I am now. I was on vacation with my family, some tropical destination. We were all staying in a small white house with jagged corners and empty rooms, only furnished with saggy, muted mattresses. I carried my baby in her carrier (I assume it was a girl as I referred to her as such in my subconscious) through the doors of this ramshackle mind shed and set my new baby in front of my own mother. I grew uneasy at the sense of judgment radiating from my relatives who had no faces, only the shape of humanness. 

I left one section of the house and moved into a secluded room where my father was lying across one of those mattresses. I threw myself on the bed beside him and cried out about my predicament. Yes, I was dreaming, but this REM state version of me missed my “child” when she was just in the other room. She felt like something I needed to run from but couldn’t remove from my hip. 

Suddenly, I was out in the ocean, swimming with the rest of my family. They convinced me to enjoy our vacation despite the weight of motherhood and the shame that accompanied it as an unwed 20-year-old. Waves were crashing against me as I drifted farther away from everyone who now looked like shadowy buoys bobbing across the surface. I was thrown into the ocean floor by walls of water. The waves transported me to shore, my lungs now brimmed with salt. I realized that I was fully clothed and began crawling up the wet sand thinking “I need to get back to my baby girl.” 

I have these kinds of dreams quite often. I once had a dream where I was giving birth and my great aunt, who had recently died, was standing beside my hospital bed, shouting at me for my stupidity in getting pregnant. I suppose you could call these nightmares. I’ve spoken to many women who’ve endured this hypnagogic state. They are mothers only while sleeping and then wake up to find themselves feeling empty, like their hypothetical child died as the sun rose.

I don’t know why this happens to us or why it hurts so badly when we wake up to realize we aren’t with child, even when we have no conscious desire to reproduce. Nevertheless, it felt like an apt time to have the dream. It is Mother’s Day after all. 

I can’t be a mother right now nor would I like to be one. But there is something in me that simulates motherhood. Where is this coming from? Biological timing? A deep-rooted desire to care for something other than myself? A psychic lapse into the future? Am I the baby?

I don’t want to think about it right now. I don’t even want to dream about it. But I find it fascinating that I have motherly instincts ingrained in even the deepest parts of my mind. Not just me, but so many women I know. Even when we’re the ones thrown into the shore, we keep moving forward, knowing we must return to “her”.