But in most cases, including my own, they occur on their own, without any other symptoms. Nightmares can sometimes be a symptom of a bigger issue, including postpartum anxiety, depression, or even PTSD from a traumatic birth event (which happens to about 9 percent of women). During prehistoric times, this would lead to safer babies, but today it can lead to stressed-out parents. They are actually part of a cavewoman-era system designed to help me keep my baby safe, not a sign that anything was wrong with her-or me. My nightmares, according to Davis, were likely an evolutionary adaptation. When you wake up after a nightmare, soothe yourself almost like you'd soothe your baby, a mantra such as “I’m having these dreams because I am attached and involved” or “Thank you, brain, for keeping my baby safe. ![]() “In brain imaging studies, the part of the brain that lights up when new parents are having these intrusive thoughts is the part of the brain that deals with vigilance and protectiveness, not violence.” “What new parents don’t realize is how many of these difficult, scary images happen because you’re attached and bonding with your baby,” says Davis. But, says Davis, if we really understood what was going on with these nightmares, we wouldn’t feel so anxious about them. “New moms who have really awful nightmares about their baby may worry that it makes them a bad mother or that it’s a premonition of something that might actually happen,” says Wendy Davis, Ph.D., the executive director of Postpartum Support International. But it could also be that there’s a stigma surrounding new mom nightmares-it’s not easy to share the disturbing visions you have about your baby. It may be that they just didn’t want to think about it-after all, the dreams are so disturbing you’d rather forget about them immediately than rehash them over a group text. In fact, all of my wonderfully oversharing friends (the same ones who happily swapped birth stories involving gory details of perineal tearing and postbirth constipation) neglected to mention anything about this extremely common and destabilizing symptom. My friend shared this story after I told her about the nightmares that haunted me. ![]() Combine that with out-of-whack hormones and a completely helpless new being to worry about, and it’s easy to see why a sleep-deprived new parent is a prime candidate for wild, lucid dreams. When you get only short bouts of it (say, because of a crying baby), your need for this type of sleep builds up so that during your next stretch of sleep, you may actually have more REM sleep and, therefore, more intense and vivid dreams. ![]() REM, which stands for “rapid eye movement,” is a sleep phase that’s tied with brain activity and dreaming, and it typically occurs every 90 minutes. Postpartum dreaming might be especially intense because of something called the REM rebound effect, says Tore Nielsen, Ph.D., director of the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal and author of the Sleep study. For many, the effects of these bad dreams lingered after they woke up-42 percent of women felt postawakening anxiety after a nightmare and 60 percent felt the need to get up and check on their infant. The lack of information I found on postpartum nightmares is surprising, considering how common they are: According to a study in the journal Sleep, 73 percent of postpartum women reported having dreams of their infant in peril. Turns out, this is a nightmare so common that one researcher created an acronym for it: BIB (Baby in Bed) dream. One mom friend told me she had a recurring dream that her baby was lost in the bed, suffocating under the covers.
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