You are pregnant, and your nights have turned strange. You left the baby on a bus. You gave birth to a cat, or to a fully grown adult who asked for the car keys. Labour started in the middle of an exam. Your ex turned up at the birth. You wake up laughing, or with your heart racing, and wonder what on earth that was.
The short answer: vivid, odd and sometimes frightening dreams are one of the most common parts of pregnancy. Research on pregnant women finds that their dreams fill with babies, birth and motherhood, and grow somewhat darker in tone towards the end, while sleep itself becomes lighter and more broken. These dreams reflect a mind working through an enormous change. They don't say anything about the baby or how the birth goes.
What studies of pregnant women found
Lara-Carrasco, Nielsen and colleagues compared dream diaries from 59 women in their third trimester with diaries from 60 women who were not pregnant, in a 2013 study. Pregnant women dreamed more often of themselves as a mother or with babies and children, and had more dreams about pregnancy, childbirth and the fetus. Childbirth showed up more late in the third trimester than earlier. Pregnant women's dreams also had more "morbid" elements, which the authors read as the psychological challenges of pregnancy showing up as a more troubled emotional tone, not as a sign of anything wrong.
An earlier study by Tore Nielsen and Tyna Paquette, published in 2007, asked pregnant and recently delivered women about dreams of the infant. Among pregnant women, 59 percent described such dreams with anxiety in them and 42 percent with the infant in peril. After birth those numbers rose, and many new mothers woke confused, anxious, or needing to check on the baby. The authors linked the pattern to the emotional weight of becoming a mother and to severely disrupted sleep.
Why the dreams feel so vivid
Part of the answer is sleep. Sedov and colleagues pooled 24 studies of more than 11,000 pregnant women in a 2018 meta-analysis and found that about 46 percent had poor sleep quality, which worsened from the second to the third trimester. Waking more often, for the bathroom, for heartburn, because you can't get comfortable, means more chances to wake straight out of a dream and remember it. People who wake during or just after dreaming recall more, and recall more vividly.
The other part is content. The pregnancy dream is read by psychologists as incubation: something developing that isn't ready yet. When you are really pregnant, that reading turns literal, and the mind has a great deal to work through: identity, the body, the relationship, money, the birth, the question every parent asks, "will I be good at this?" Dreams take those waking concerns and give them strong, strange images.
Common versions of this dream
You forget or lose the baby. In a pram left at a shop, on a train, in a drawer. One of the most reported pregnancy dreams. It usually tracks a fear of not being ready, not a lack of care.
The baby is an animal or an object. A kitten, a fish, a loaf of bread. Often a sign the mind has no clear picture of the baby yet, which fits the finding that baby images grow less specific late in pregnancy.
Something goes wrong at the birth. Frightening, and very common. These dreams rehearse the event you know is coming; they don't foretell anything about it.
The baby can talk or is already grown. The mind skipping ahead, trying to meet the person you are about to meet.
Your partner is absent or someone else. Often about support: who will be there, and whether you will feel alone. The baby symbol page covers more of the scenes with a newborn.
What the old dream books said
The old books had a good deal to say about pregnancy, mostly judged by the dreamer's marital status in ways that read badly today. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) was mostly unkind to a woman's dream of being pregnant, but added one wholly favourable branch for a woman who really was pregnant: he read her dream as a safe delivery and a swift recovery of strength. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) called a dream of a young infant an excellent omen of joy and good luck. Artemidorus, in his second-century Oneirocritica (Krauss's 1881 German translation), read a young woman dreaming of milk in her breasts as conceiving, carrying to term and a happy delivery.
We report these as history, not as reassurance or warning. Dreams don't predict how a pregnancy or a birth goes; the guide on whether dreams predict the future explains why. Questions about your pregnancy belong with your midwife or doctor.
What helps
Tell the dream to someone. Said out loud over breakfast, the dream about giving birth in a supermarket usually becomes a story, and the dark ones lose some of their weight. Writing down the ones that stay with you can show a pattern, such as dreams that get louder after a hard appointment or a stressful week; the guide on how to remember dreams has simple methods.
If dreams are frequently frightening, the guide on nightmares has general advice. And if sleep is very poor, or a worry from a dream won't let go, bring it up with your midwife or doctor; that is what those appointments are for. This page is not medical advice.
A question to sit with
If the strangest dream you have had this pregnancy were a question rather than a picture, what would it be asking you?
The general reading only goes so far. Your pregnancy has its own shape: the baby who is always a girl in dreams, or the birth that is always somewhere ridiculous. That pattern only shows up across many dreams, remembered together. It is what Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is built for: it listens to the dreams you record, paints them, and remembers what keeps coming back.