Dream Narration In Healthy and At-Risk Pregnancy

Dreaming is something we can’t control, we unconsciously reminisce or make up scenarios in our head while we are asleep. Some nights we have good dreams and others, they aren’t so great. Everybody has dreams, whether a person can recall their dreams from the night before or not doesn’t deny the fact that they still happened. Studies have shown that dreaming can affect the outcome of a woman’s pregnancy. One might ask, how can a dream, something that occurs mentally affect the physical health of a woman’s pregnancy? Well, throughout the different stages of pregnancy, the intensity of a woman’s sleep changes.

An example would be in the first trimester of pregnancy women start losing their ability to have a deep sleep and are more likely to recall their dreams than they were before they were pregnant. Many pregnant women dream about their pregnancies and their babies. So, if a woman dreams that there is something wrong with her baby she is going to freak out and truly believe that there is something wrong.

This would lead to stress and we all know that even though stress is a psychological response, it can cause physical damage, remember all of those times when you were stressed about exams and a pimple appeared on your face? Although that may not be as tragic an event as losing your child, it’s a negative response to the stress that you were experiencing.

In Italy at the University of Naples Federico II, a study was conducted using 40 pregnant women of the ages 18-35, who never had a miscarriage or had any diagnosed psychiatric conditions.

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20 at-risk pregnant women were selected and 20 healthy pregnant women were selected. The women were asked to recount one of the dreams they had while they were pregnant. The researchers would meet up with the women the day of their regular gynecological check-ups or after their ante-natal classes. The software they used to analyze the dreams is called T-Lab which “identifies the dimensions of meaning and the different themes present in the text under analysis.” The researchers grouped their results into 4 clusters.

The cluster was called “From peaceful to stormy: pregnancy as an event.” There are 2 examples of dreams given, the first woman says that she was having constant dreams about babies and suggests that maybe she is just excited to give birth. The second woman says that she has been dreaming about giving birth. These women belonged to the group of women who were experiencing healthy, low-risk pregnancies, they aren’t dreaming anything bad, in fact, they seem to be contemptuous as if they are just happy to be bringing a new life into this world. Cluster 2 is called “ Male-Female: from real to fantasy”. In this cluster, the example given was that the mother kept dreaming that she was having a boy, but she knows the sex of her child is a girl. She said that she found this upsetting, but no traumatizing events were occurring in these dreams. This cluster also represents many of the no-risk women.