Dreamland Anxious Place for New Moms
Reported September 3, 2007
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A sleeping baby may conjure up images of sweet dreams, but the same may not be true for her mother.
A new study out of Canada reveals a surprisingly high percentage of new moms are plagued with troublesome dreams often involving their infant in perilous situations.
Researchers compared data from 273 women who filled out questionnaires about pregnancy, birth factors, personality and sleep. About 200 of the women had just had a baby, about 50 were currently pregnant, and the rest had never been pregnant.
About 90 percent of the women reported being able to recall their dreams, and both pregnant and postpartum women reported dreaming about their baby with about the same frequency. Nearly 75 percent of women who had just delivered their child, however, reported having anxious dreams and dreams where their infants were in some form of danger.
These women were also more likely wake up and act out their dreams — like frantically trying to locate the infant in the bed to save him or her from smothering, even though the infant was snuggly tucked into his own crib at the time.
Hallucinatory baby-in-bed nightmares and other vivid dreams of the baby in peril appear to arise normally in response to the acute maternal responsibilities and sleep fragmentation that are endured by new mothers, study author Tore Nielsen, Ph.D., from the Sleep Research Centre at the Hôpital du Sacré-Cur de Montréal, was quoted as saying. The unique experiences constitute a window through which cognitive and emotional processes underlying the earliest steps of mother-infant attachment may be observed.
The authors credit these sleep disturbances, in part, to the changes a womans body goes through during and after pregnancy.
SOURCE: SLEEP, 2007;30:1162-1169