Dreams - not the good kind

With the exception of Friday night, when I dreamed that I was a race car driver in Hazzard County, I have had a bad dream about the baby every night. So far, I have dreamed:

• That the baby was born early and we didn't have a crib or a rocking chair or diapers
• That the baby was born early and we kept forgetting to feed him
• That the baby had cystic fibrosis (I really only had a vague idea of what that even was until I woke up from this dream and googled it)
• The the baby inherited an upturned pig nose from me - not a pig nose like mine, but a real animal pig nose
• That the baby was born and was so small that we kept losing her

The worst, however, was last night. I dreamed that I went to the doctor and she printed out a sonogram picture and said "The pregnancy is gone. All that is left are some bones." She showed me the picture of my stomach with a few tiny bones inside. "We'll have to do another surgery," she said, "but this time, we can't use any anesthetics. You have to be awake to tell us when it's all gone." She began wheeling me to an operating room. I was crying and protesting and screaming, but I couldn't get up from the gurney. I was yelling for them to call B, but I knew that he was in a meeting and couldn't be reached.

I woke up crying, and I still feel a little bit dazed. I was especially disturbed by the image of the doctor calling the baby "the pregnancy." That is what they kept calling it at the abortion clinic we had to go to last time, and it really bothered me. It was very Orwellian. (Speaking of having to go to abortion clinics, I ended up filing a complaint against my last doctor's license and was recently notified that she is being investigated for mismanaging my pregnancy.) The worst part was the feeling that it was real when I woke up. I just kept thinking that I couldn't go through it again. It was unbearable.

I know that vivid dreams, especially anxiety dreams, are normal during pregnancy. Right before B and I got married, I had all kinds of anxiety dreams that had to do with weddings, and right before I graduated, I started dreaming that I was short by one credit and couldn't walk. But still, pregnancy dreams are different because they are so vivid and intense. It's frustrating to wake up exhausted in the middle of the night, and then be afraid to go back to sleep.