Miscarriage Dreams

WARNING: This post is pretty graphic. Appropriate for Halloween maybe, but consider yourself warned.

For months I’ve been having miscarriage dreams. They show up about once a week, and always leave me completely freaked out. Up until last night, they’ve been pretty much the same. I’m in the middle of an otherwise ordinary dream—no reason for me to suspect I’m dreaming—and I go to pee and find blood on the toilet paper. At first just a little bit, then a few drops more, and then the cramps start to kick in.

It used to take me a minute to realize that this was bad. After all, it’s been a pretty frequent occurrence for me for the past 25 years or so—it’s strange NOT to be bleeding for so long. But then, as realization dawned, I would have that “oh no” moment. I remember the first such dream vividly, rocking back and forth on the toilet saying, “No, no, no, no, no” until J finally heard me and woke me up. And it’s getting harder for me to wake myself up from these dreams as well. A few weeks ago, I had a whole conversation with myself—in my dream—about how this time I wasn’t dreaming and it was real. I actually pulled the oldest cliché in the book—while still dreaming, I pinched myself over and over again to prove I wasn’t dreaming, which eventually managed to wake me up.

Last night my brain decided to raise the stakes, and I dreamed that I had the whole miscarriage. Not the way it would actually be, of course, because it didn’t take more than a minute and didn’t hurt much. It started the same way, some blood in the toilet. But then there was a gush, like when you’re passing a big blood clot, and my babies fell out into the toilet, one right after the other. Luckily for my sanity, they didn’t look like babies—they were just bundled packages that I knew had my babies inside.

It happened so fast—I knew my pregnancy had ended but just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. It was like those dreams (if you have them you’ll understand) where you’ve done something incredibly stupid, like drive off a ledge, and now you’re falling and you know you’re going to die and you know that there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve passed the point of no return, and it’s just . . . over.

And with this dream, like all of the others before it, as soon as it happened there was a voice inside my head saying, “but of course, here’s the miscarriage—knew it was going to happen sooner or later.” Of all the things about these dreams that scare me, I think this sense of resignation over the miscarriage, the sense that it was inevitable, is the most disturbing.

I’m not big into dream analysis. I pretty much subscribe to the theory that my brain does a lot of random dicking around while I sleep. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure what these dreams mean.

I definitely have had my worry-dream phases before. When I left home for college I went through a phase where I kept dreaming about bad things happening to my little brother. And when I first adopted kittens I dreamed about some catastrophe happening and not knowing what to do to save them. I suspect that when I actually have the kids I’ll have dreams about bad things happening to them, too.

But I wonder—do women who haven’t struggled to get pregnant have these dreams? Do women who’ve never lost a pregnancy have them? And if not, what do they dream about?

And I’m curious—as the fertility drugs and pregnancy hormones zip around through your bodies, what are you all dreaming about?