The Function of Dreams That Frighten Pregnant Women

Everyone has, at some point, noticed that their mood during the day is sometimes influenced by what they dreamed the night before. For no objective reason, one feels confident and optimistic, or melancholy and irritable. While in the first case one doesn't ask too many questions and simply enjoys the mood, in the second one would like to know the connection, why one feels bothered by the after-effect a dream can leave, especially if it clashes with what one is feeling during that period.

This is what happens to many pregnant women, who, going through a calm pregnancy, do not expect to have (and often repeatedly) dreams that frighten and terrify them (sometimes taken as omens of misfortune), casting a shadow over what should be such a positive period.

In reality, these dreams with destructive manifest content (dreams of violence, of fighting, of blood, of death, of accidents, of cataclysms, of attacks, etc.) serve a protective function for the pregnancy, since they allow the fulfillment of unconscious childhood desires that could otherwise be realized through situations that endanger the pregnancy (miscarriage) or the mother's well-being (symptoms).

It should be remembered, in fact, that the pregnant woman relives, without realizing it, the sensations she felt from the time of her own intrauterine life, when she was contained within her own mother's womb. There, every embryo fights a war to survive the attempts the mother unconsciously makes to get rid of him, since he is a foreign body that her cells do not recognize "as self". The fertilized egg, which arises from the fusion of the maternal ovum and the paternal sperm, is in fact a foreign cell to the maternal body, which nonetheless must host it for nine months. For this to happen, the maternal cells must come to tolerate it, as if it were the same as themselves. But this happens only after an initial struggle, whose intensity differs for each mother/embryo pair: it depends, in fact, on the strength of the mother's expulsion drive and on the embryo's ability to "attach" itself.

When a woman becomes pregnant, the traces of the uterine war experienced at the start of her own life are reactivated, and they color the one she will now experience with her own embryo.

The inevitable clash between mother and child at the start of pregnancy shows itself in different situations, more or less compatible with the pregnancy's continuation:

• miscarriage, which represents the success of this attempt but which often clashes with the conscious desire to have a child;
• gastrointestinal symptoms, in which the expulsion does take place, but through substitutions carried out at the unconscious level;
• dreams, which represent the most physiological solution for fulfilling, in disguised form, the unconscious desires that arose during intrauterine and infantile life and that have been reactivated by the pregnancy.

So, for women who happen to have dreams of this kind, it can be useful and reassuring to remember what they express and why they occur, rather than letting themselves be frightened by the dream images they remember upon waking.