Perchance to Dream*

Aaron habitually asks me in the morning if I had any dreams. He often gets a lengthy, detailed answer. When I dream, I do so vividly, and when I start to recount a dream, all the crazy specifics start to come back to me. (Aaron's favorite dream of mine is one where I was a fork hiding out in a potted plant, kissing a spoon. Analyze that.) Over the past few weeks, the stage of my somnolent mind put on a couple of infertility spectaculars.

In the first one, I had finally managed to get pregnant and gave birth at 19 weeks, and the baby was fine! (Subconscious probably influenced by the story swirling around in the news of the preemie that had survived birth just before 21 weeks.) We were so happy, and I kept my baby boy by my side at all times. At one point, I dreamt that the baby was nursing; I peeked under the blanket covering us and gazed in awe at his little head as I felt him latch and thought, "Wow! I can't believe we're really getting this nursing thing so well!" Flash to a new scene - Aaron & I are driving to meet some friends (mostly people we were RAs with in college) at a coffee shop for a concert. Baby is in a sling with me in the front passenger seat, because his unexpectedly early birth meant that we hadn't had a chance to buy a car seat. We made a wrong turn and started up this mountain road made up entirely of hairpin turns. Since the road behind us was clear, we decided to reverse down the road rather than executing a very tight turn-around. I got out of the car to direct Aaron, and I stood on the side of the road munching a piece of toast. Suddenly, in that weirdly clear dream-logic, I realized that the piece of toast was my baby, and I was half-way through eating him! Panicked, I tried to hide what I had done by shoving the remaining portion of toast back into the sling, pressing it to my body, and praying, "Please grow back, please grow back." I got back in the car with Aaron and we drove on to the coffee shop and met our friends, and all the while I am fearfully keeping secret the half-eaten toast-baby, trying to deftly avoid all questions and requests to see the baby. That's when I woke up, feeling horribly unfit to ever be a mother. Disturbing and vivid, no?

The second dream, I woke up laughing. We were in church, and our friend James was speaking a prophetic word to all the infertile women in the congregation. (Um, that would be me. But in the dream I wasn't the only one.) He was fervently pacing the stage, microphone in hand, shouting, and generally carrying on in a rather disorderly manner - in other words, not like his real self at all and not in a way that would ever be permitted by our pastors! As James hysterically prayed for all the infertiles, he suddenly burst out in a strange language, commanding, "Eine...Nova...Nueve...APPLE!" Which translated, meant, "One...two...three...OVULATE!" At this point, I surfaced from slumber to hear Aaron asking me what was so funny. I wasn't conscious enough to tell him before I fell back asleep, but when our alarm went off later in the morning I told him, barely able to squeak out the last part as laughter prevented normal breathing.

I like the dream behind door number 2 better, don't you?

*Unprecedented! Three posts in as many days! And I'll probably post again tomorrow!