Theresa Cheung Interpretation: Pregnancy is one of the most life-changing, and physically and emotionally demanding challenges a woman can face in her lifetime. Research shows that the dreams of pregnant women can comment on the physical, psychological and emotional issues she has to deal with. The most common dream themes at this time concern animals and water. In the early stages of the pregnancy, these dreams may be gentle and calming, but towards the end of the pregnancy they can be traumatic or even become nightmares. Such alarming dreams are considered a normal reaction to the anxiety every woman unconsciously feels about her unborn baby and about giving birth.
It is also very common for pregnant women to dream about having the baby and these dreams are again often bizarre and disturbing; for example, dreaming about a baby that is born dead, malformed or with a monster’s head. It has been suggested that such anxiety dreams serve a purpose: they release a lot of unconscious tension and fear, allowing the mother to be more relaxed at birth.
Pregnancy is one of the most powerful experiences any woman can face. Her own body certainly changed enormously during her childhood and adolescence, but to meet such enormous physical, personal, and social changes as an adult is a huge challenge. A woman’s dreams at such a time not only show some of the detailed events that are occurring physically, but also comment on psychological and relationship events and subtleties too. Themes common in the dreams of pregnant women are those of animals and water. At first such dreams of water or animals may be calm, even healing, but later on in pregnancy there may be dreams of turmoil or even nightmares. Several studies show this is normal, in the sense that it is experienced by many women, and probably reflects the anxieties unconsciously held by the woman about her unborn baby and about birth. It is also very common for women to dream about actually having the baby, and these dreams are often bizarre or even disturbing to the dreamer. C. Winget and F. Kapp found that a high percentage of dreams showed this theme of anxiety, and by following their research through, they were able to observe that the more anxiety dreams a mother-to-be had, the easier the birth was. They conjecture that the anxiety dreams release a lot of tension and fear, and the mother is therefore more relaxed at the time of the birth—usually less than ten hours. (From, “The Relationship of the Manifest Content of Dreams to Duration of Childbirth in Primiparae.” Psychosomatic Medicine 34 (1972) The anxiety dreams include such images as giving birth to a baby who is only a few ounces in weight, the baby is malformed, the baby is born dead, the baby is blind or deaf or injured.