Pregnant women often report that their dream life has intensified during pregnancy: they feel they dream more and/or remember their dreams better on waking, as if their condition put them more in tune with that aspect of the mind to which little attention is usually paid.
Before discussing the typical dreams pregnant women have (which will be the subject of upcoming articles), and to avoid expecting interpretations that have nothing scientific about them, it is necessary to understand that dreams are a rather complex subject, one that speaks to us, through its own particular language (based on rules foreign to our conscious mind), about our childhood, our most intimate desires, our deepest feelings. In other words, it reveals to us a submerged world held in the unconscious, one that concerns us but of which we are not (and cannot be) aware, made up of memories recorded too long ago for us to access, and of aspects of ourselves that are as real as they are difficult to accept according to our moral standards.
The dream is therefore a manifestation of the unconscious that, in order to reach consciousness, must undergo distortions, a kind of translation that follows complex rules, knowledge of which cannot be set aside when it comes to interpretation.
Here we will limit ourselves to saying that a dream is made up of two parts: the scenes one remembers and can recount on waking (which often echo everyday situations but can also be absurd) make up the manifest content. For example, it can often happen to recognize several people in a single dream character, or to dream of a place that has features from various known locations, and so on. The manifest content, then, represents a kind of shell that encloses the whole set of thoughts that connect to the dream in some way, whether directly or by association, and that make up the «latent content». It is within this latent content that the core of the dream is hidden, that is, the childhood desires of unconscious origin that created it in order to find a way to discharge themselves.
Looking for interpretations based on the manifest content is as useless and misleading as trying to identify who is wearing a mask by studying the mask's features. In the manifest content, the elements of the dream appear disguised and distorted, to the point of making its meaning incomprehensible. So the idea that having a certain kind of dream has a specific meaning has no scientific value whatsoever: that belongs to the manifest content, not to the essence of the dream, which can only be grasped through a thorough analysis of the latent content, through which it becomes possible to recognize the unconscious desires that created it.
As Freud put it: «a collection of dreams without associations and without knowledge of the circumstances in which they occurred tells me nothing, and I can hardly imagine what it could tell anyone».