Warning: This One Is A Nightmare

This one is pretty awful, kind of horror-movie. So you may want to skip this entry.

I'm at work, and my boss Steve tells me that there is going to be a prisoner exchange with these terrorists, and he needs volunteers. That it'll be temporary and just for the publicity. I go with a group, me with my big belly and Tyler bundled up against my chest protectively and a big coat. I try to be friendly and talk to the terrorists but it doesn't work. We are taken out to the woods and are given the choice between crawling down into a muddy hole with water dripping in under a cover where I'd be left alone but have to fend off rats, cholera, and starvation, or to more of a prison but where I might not be treated well. I take the prison, we all do, and we travel by bus. I get there to realize we're being handed off to WWII era Nazi's, and first they take my coat b/c it's valuable. I had been kind of hiding Tyler under it and feel vulnerable. Then I'm taken to this crazy woman, who is experimenting surgically on babies. She wants to work on Tyler and is disappointed he's not a girl, but writes a date of surgery on him, on his arm in pen, and on me, too. In the dream I'm expecting a girl, and the crazy lady surgeon, (whose personality would remind of you Drusilla on the Buffy series, except she looks like Becky, the VP of Editorial here at work who last year died of cancer), wants to manipulate the baby in utero to achieve some kind of result only she understands. I am told to go rest for the night and am sent to a ward with mutilated babies in basinettes and another mom and baby pair who have been driven insane by the treatments. I'm horrified and am thinking desperately of escape or murder/suicide. I lay down, sleepless, but wake up to realize she'd drugged me and dressed me and Tyler in matching red velvet party dresses. He has also been moved away from me into one of the basinettes. I go to him and again contemplate murder/suicide, specifically suffocation, and begin to cry.

At this point I wake up terrfied, at about 3:30 last night. I was up for about an hour and a half just trying to forget the nightmare, checking on Tyler in his crib, feeling the baby move in my tummy, sitting with a light on and reading a book.

I don't have a gut feeling about what this one is about, as I often do about dreams. It would make more sense if the crazy lady had been my doctor because then it would easily be about how I feel about the pregnancy and it's medicalization. Instead they were characters from work. The fear of something going wrong/being threatened in the pregnancy is clear enuf in the dream and relatively normal. But then I do not know why Tyler was also put into danger. And it was truly awful to have the only way out, as a mother, to end it all and take them with me. It still is really awful to think of it. Perhaps it means that I am feeling some degree of powerlessness right now concerning my mothering as well as my pregnancy. That would fit well enough, with Ben working evenings and my growing physical limitations with caring for Tyler, getting to him quickly or climbing stairs are both hard, for instance.

This is a highly personal blog, and I hope no-one is freaked out by spooky entries like this one!