Haunted

I can't sleep. Again.

Not because I'm pregnant, though that does its share of damage.

No. I can't sleep anymore because I'm haunted.
Truly. It's bad.

I have a few friends who have told me about the horrific dreams they have only when they're pregnant. Dreams about awful things happening to family and loved ones. Dreams that keep them up.

Funny, I thought. Because for all of my life, my dreams have been ultra-vivid. Like being in a movie. Or a book. With deep, dynamic plot lines and danger and fear and love and romance and all those elements. And they always feel real, while I'm in them. Real enough that sometimes Chad is forced to listen to me talk them away at two in the morning, so that I can fade back into sleep without a stomach knotted with fear. So it was funny, I thought, that some of my friends were getting their first taste of that during pregnancy.

And now, with my third pregnancy nearing its end, I realize that I had no idea what they were really saying when they told me they had bad dreams. No idea. None at all.

Because NOW I am haunted with bad dreams.
Awful, horrific dreams. About my children. And death.
And I didn't know what it felt like to have a dream fit just like a reality before.

But now I do. Oh man!

I feel the soul of myself shatter to fragments as I pull my little girl's crushed body from beneath a car. I cannot even breathe as I look at the blood. I cannot bring myself to even look at her face, because I know it's not there anymore. I am literally suffocating. Because nothing about this is a dream. It is too real, too awfully, horrifically, devastatingly real. And I wake up gasping for air, for life, for a miracle.

Or I am sobbing, sobbing uncontrollably as I try to explain to my husband, who just got home from work, that now Coren is dead. Risa died last week, unexplainably, and now his boy is dead too. But I can't explain because I can't even speak. My body is wrenched, wracked with a pain that has no words. And he waits for the news, while I sit in a heap on the floor, wondering why I'm still alive. And all I can get out is, "Oh Honey, why did we ever have kids? How will I ever get through this?" And I cry, and I cry, and I cry. And I wake up to my own heavy sobbing.

And Chad silently moves to my side of the bed and puts his arms around me. The dark room and his warm body jar me out of the dream. And it was a dream. I can breathe a sigh of relief. Except it doesn't come yet. Even in the reality of my safe little bed, in my safe little home, with my living, breathing family, I am haunted. For ten minutes I cry and shudder with fear, with my face buried in my husband's chest. And the dream slowly fades away. But not nearly fast enough. And even with my mind completely reassured that the scene was a figment, a dream, I have this intense need to go into my kids' rooms and feel their chest rising and falling. To scoop them up and hold them and just breathe, breathe with them and feel their warm, living bodies in my arms.

I hope this is a symptom of this one single pregnancy. I hope I don't experience these with the next one. I don't think I could do it, keep growing more children, while my nights are haunted with the loss of those I already have. I don't know that I can do it for eight more weeks. It is too awful. It is too haunting.

I need a dream with unicorns. And Care Bears. And rainbows. And laughing children running along the beach. That is what I need. How do I fix that up?