34 Weeks and Dreaming

It's finally happened. I can't see my feet. Why wasn't I warned that socks would become a trial? I can reach my feet, I just never imagined myself going through acrobatics to put socks on before. 

And posture. Who knew that third-trimester pregnancy would do so much for your posture? This is what I've learned: if you don't sit up straight, you don't breathe. See, when your entire abdomen is taken up with person, there's no room for your normal organs, like stomach and lungs. So things like relaxing on the couch suddenly have a new challenge: be comfortable and keep your top half completely extended. 

People have been asking if I've had any crazy pregnancy-induced dreams. 

Here's the tricky part with that: whenever I have a dream, pregnant or not, odds are good that it will be crazy and/or stupid. 

When I was eleven, I had a dream that I was at Raging Waters with Peter Pan and all the lost boys. I was Wendy (naturally). We were there to save something, but somehow Peter couldn't remember what we were saving. So we wandered around all day, dragging a fire hose (because you can't save crap without a fire hose) and looking for something to save. 

In high school, I had a dream that my dad inexplicably decided it was his mission from God to kill my best friend. He bought the gun, practiced shooting, everything. For several weeks, I cried and begged him not to kill her. I warned him it would ruin his career as a pastor. Finally, he agreed that he wouldn't shoot her -- instead, he would shoot her older sister. Who is a cop. Nothing I did could change his mind. So he broke into her house and shot her -- but missed the killing shot and only shot her in the leg. She's a cop, and he's her pastor, remember. So this situation was very very bad for him. When I told my dad about this dream, he was concerned. When I told my friend and her sister about this dream, they got very upset with my dad. My dad pointed out that they should be upset with me, not him, but I convinced them to just stay mad at him instead.

About a year after graduating from college, I had one of those stressful two-exams-at-the-same-time dreams. I woke up panting, sure that both Dr. Whalen and Dr. Jackson would take away my degree because I had failed their exams so badly, mostly by not knowing which test to study for, then by not knowing which test to show up for, so I had a panic attack and stayed in bed. In my dream.

Earlier, in my first trimester, I had a dream that I was with a bunch of college friends (mostly the group from Olds, way back in freshman year). We were in space, naturally, and our spaceship was under attack by aliens. Only... since we were stowaways in the US military spaceship, we couldn't even be found by the "good guys" who were defending the ship against the aliens. There was a lot of sneaking around and freaking out that both the aliens and the military astronauts would find us and... oh, I don't know, kill us. But this dream also occurred during the early onset of one of my nesting urges. So while all my friends were primarily stressed about the aliens finding us, I was really worried about things like cleaning out my dorm room fridge (which was obviously in the spaceship) and filing class notes properly before we were caught. This did not elicit much sympathy from the others.

But since I've always been a bit OCD, I'm not even sure that last one was entirely due to the pregnancy. 

I'm pretty sure, though, that the dream I had in the second trimester was pregnancy-induced. I dreamt that we had three baby showers, but not at a single one did we receive even one thing from the registry that I had spent hours and hours crafting. And then, to make matters worse, Eric died. 

And last night's dream certainly came from the pregnancy.

Last night, I had my first dream about giving birth. I gave birth to a 12-pound baby with lots and lots of chin-length dark hair. This baby also resembled a 12-month old, not a newborn. Since Eric and I were both towheads, and I was bald until the age of 2,  I'm not sure where the hair came from. It worried me a bit... until I realized that I had actually given birth to a kitten. This was slightly upsetting. I love kittens, but you can purchase those. You don't need to spend nine months making them. Also, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law are frightfully allergic to cats, so being with family was about to become a huge nightmare. 

Then I woke up.

"Eric, would you still love me if I gave birth to a kitten?"

"Well, yes. But I would be a bit weirded out."

"If I gave birth to a kitten, would you still want to --"

"Wenders, we're not having this conversation. It's not going to happen."

And that was that.