I don't dream. Oh, I know from Psych 101 class that we all need to dream, so maybe I should rephrase that by saying I don't remember my dreams. Never have.

When I was doing my internship, I had a roommate who was way into the Freudian Analysis of dreams and had me do that thing where you leave a notepad by your bedside and then at the moment you wake up, write down everything you remember from your dreams so you don't forget them as you conscious mind starts taking over. This is what my notebook looked like:

May 21st



May 22nd



May 23rd



etc., etc.

After a week or so, it got so boring that I gave up and resigned myself to being the kind of person who doesn't dream. And that's remained pretty consistent throughout my life, other than a few instances where I remember a hint of something I dreamed in the morning (which usually comes true a few days later) or where I wake up in the middle of the night with that elusive line of code I was trying to write for work or the solution to some other problem in my head, but those are issues for another post.

During my first two pregnancies, that held true as well. No dreams. But with this one, all bets are off and I've had some of the most wildly inconceivable, yet incredibly plausible dreams where I wake up and have to do a mental check to decide if it really happened or not.

Last night this was the scene:

My mother, who waited nearly 40 years to break it to me, had decided now was the time that I should know that I'd entered the Witness Protection Program when I was a child. I was too young to remember and since then all my friends, family, ethnicity and background had just been the figment of some government employee's imagination who made it all up back in the 70s. My name was not my name, my parents were not my parents, and she'd thought now it was time for me to know. Through the whole dream, she kept trying to tell me why it all had happened in the first place, (I was a member of the mafia? I'd turned state's evidence on John Gotti? Gotten into a fight with Carlo Gambino's three year old and called him a poopyhead? I don't know.) but we were at some sort of party and every time someone walked into the room, we had to find another private place to talk. The anticipation was killing me as I woke up. Apparently, never to know what my brain would have dreamed up for an answer if I'd just managed to stay asleep ten minutes longer.

Wonder what Freud would say about that? Actually, it might explain a few things.