By Olivia Humphreys for Earshot
There is a certain image of pregnancy visible in the advertisements around us that depicts soon-to-be mothers as clean, pastel-coloured and happy.
It all seems very far from what I imagine, which is a bit more along the lines of the famous scene from Aliens with John Hurt, where an alien comes ripping out of his stomach.
I’ve always thought it’s interesting how pregnancy is usually portrayed as a happy, content time of painting nurseries and humming lullabies to yourself, when there’s such scary, extreme and bizarre physical stuff happening to you.
All the changes make your body unrecognisable and no longer really your own — you’re now a “host” to another being.
And of course there’s the birth looming over you.
Poet Hollie McNish, whose book Nobody Told Me is about her experiences of childbirth, describes this as “like knowing you’re going to be in a car crash in a few months’ time”.
Pregnant women have more nightmares
So I was intrigued to come across an academic study by the Sleep and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal, which suggested that pregnant women experience more nightmares than non-pregnant women.
Unsurprisingly, the nightmares were often directly related to pregnancy, and there were recurring themes.
For instance, many women dreamt about eating their baby, misplacing it or harming it in some way, of giving birth to an insect or a ball of wool, or even a Damien-style Satanic child.
I was fascinated, because it seemed so completely at odds with how pregnant women are often portrayed — not just as beatifically happy but almost holy, sanctified, and often infantilised.
Unlike most other adults, pregnant women often find themselves being scolded and told what they can and can’t do.