The Dream

Kathy Ruttenberg
Overgrown

They say pregnant ladies have particularly vibrant dreams. And, it seems, I seem to remember a good many of them. I finally had my first baby dream, however. The dream started with a newborn infant whom I nursed, but whom gradually began to appear overly mature. She was alert, active, and very much able to hold her head up. The baby got squirmier and squirmier, until she was crawling–this, only within a matter of days. She also got tinier and tinier, until she could crawl on my hand, up my shoulder, and onto the wall. The baby, we soon realized was half gecko.

The half gecko baby was neither a surprise. Her hybridness in the dream, seems to have been a metaphor for my real baby's sperm donorness. I had chosen a gecko to co-create my baby–for reasons still not clear to me–but I had not imagined the possibility of her wildness. And wild she was, flitting away from me, nursing then clambering up walls, in search of whatever it is that beckons the gecko. When I awoke, the first thing I thought was what have I done? Who, exactly, had I chosen to be the second half of her gene pool and what affect would this have on her? How not in control I felt! Would she be domesticatable or would she, too, be wild to this otherness inside her?