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Kroll was one of those moms-to-be who had a dream she couldn't ignore. She dreamt that she gave birth to an 18-year-old half-boy, half-camel. "I was incredibly disappointed that I had missed his whole childhood," she recalls. Kroll has since analyzed the dream and decided that it was a sign of the conflict she had within herself about being a working mother who might not be there for her child all the time. The fact that he was part-animal likely represented the unpredictability of a baby and his capability to destroy parts of her life. (Her now 3-year-old son was born "at 7 pounds, not 150," she happily adds.) "For every woman, becoming a mother is an identity shift," Greenberg adds. In fact, "identity" was only supposed to be the first chapter of the book but it ended up being the focus of the whole thing. The most common dream among the interviewees was the "I-can't-find-the-baby dream." Greenberg says the majority of women interpreted that dream as a symbol of the simultaneous joy and apprehension about motherhood. When expectant mothers thought mostly of their past, it was a way for them to say goodbye to their old, more independent life, according to the book, and if they dreamed about dead relatives, it was a way to seek approval to enter the next phase of their lives. Dreaming about a child that resembles an alien allows a mother-to-be to wonder what her child will be like beyond the daytime visions of a perfect baby, the authors say.
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