Uterine-somnia

For six months I have been having the same dream. Not every night, mind you, but frequent enough to be noteworthy. This has happened to me before, but never quite like this. I used to dream about lakes and rivers, my high school with glass walls, and monsters that I could never quite see. Now I'm dreaming about babies.

In my dream, women don't carry their babies on the inside anymore. The placenta is held outside the body and, as long as the mother keeps it close by, the baby will thrive. To be clear, this is not your average, nightmare-fuel placenta: it looks like a transparent, glowing red peach. Kind of like a picture of a baby in utero, but cuter in its dreamlike softness.

Like this, but with a baby inside.

I'm not pregnant in this dream (would you even call it pregnant? It's more like laying an egg). I am on a walk in the small, woodsy area behind my house, and I find one of these tiny baby orbs nestled beneath a tree. There's no one around, and I pick it up. It's warm and soft, and somehow the baby is still alive. I can feel its heartbeat like butterfly wings against my cupped palms.

Suddenly, I'm gripped by a feeling of heart-stopping panic. I know that I need to find this baby's mother. If I don't, if I can't, there will be nothing anyone can do. This baby will die in my hands. I start running around the neighborhood, knocking on every door as I feel the baby's heart growing weaker and weaker. The last door I knock on (I'm fairly desperate and crying at this point) is opened by a girl about my age. She just looks at me and says, "Oh, I was wondering where I left that" and she takes it from me and slams the door in my face.

And then I wake up.

It is the most infuriating dream I have ever had, and somehow more of a nightmare than the time when I was four and I dreamed that Cookie Monster came out of my closet and ate my foot (so graphic). It's not terrifying in any way, but it is exhausting and stressful and maddening and I have no idea why.

I don't think about babies much in my waking hours, so the only thing I can think to pin this on would be a subconscious fear or anxiety of some kind, (though what that might be, I couldn't say). In the dream dictionary I found on Google, it says that if you find a baby in a dream, it means you've unlocked some kind of hidden potential. If that is the case, it would be nice of the baby would just tell me what I'm supposed to figure out so I can stop having this dream. The dream dictionary says nothing about crushing panic and terrible people, but I figure that not everything needs to have a meaning. I'm kind of hoping that writing about it will help work it out of my system, and maybe unlock whatever potential (or just... whatever) is hiding in my head. At the very least, I'm hoping it will give me at least one week with a full seven nights of unbroken rest.

If there are any dream-benders out there who can shed a little more light on this one, do please enlighten me. Until then, I guess I'll just be the tired girl in the corner.