I had another baby dream last night.  Of all the bad dreams I have, the baby dreams are some of the worst.  Usually, I dream that I suddenly have a newborn.  I don’t remember being pregnant with it and I don’t remember giving birth to it, but now it’s here and I have to take care of it.  Or I dream that I’m at the very end of a pregnancy and spend the entire time scared out of my wits that I have to get this thing out of me.

Dreaming about having a newborn is worse because after I have the kid, I forget to take care of it.  Usually I forget to feed it, and the baby gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappears, and then I freak about what I’m going to tell all the people who know I had a baby.  Or I somehow manage to raise it into toddler-hood but then forget about it in its room, and it turns feral.  And I still have to worry about telling people.  Plus, you know, now it’s a wolf child who wants to kill me.

Last night, I dreamed that I had a kid who was probably 2, but could talk and reason like a 5-year-old.  It had the upper body of an older kid, too, but the legs of a baby.  Fat and weak and worthless.  I started worrying about why my baby never learned to walk and remembered that since it was my kid, obviously I had forgotten some important step in its development.  Because in my dream life, I am a terrible parent.  Which isn’t surprising at all, nor is it surprising that I get way more upset in the dreams where my pets are in danger.

Aside from the baby dreams, these are my worst nightmares:

1. Zombies.  Chances are that if I’m having a scary dream, it involves running away from zombies.  For some reason, people in my dream life trust me to lead humanity against the zombies, which almost always results in me having a crossbow or chainsaw.

2. School.  I’m back in high school and have been skipping class for oh, ten years or so.  Now I have to figure out my schedule (printed on paper so faint I can barely read it), find the classroom (which has moved to I don’t know where), and somehow fly under the teacher’s radar as a student who has actually bothered to show up (which never works).  Either that or I’m stuck in the cafeteria because I can’t decide what to get for lunch before it closes.  It takes me the entire dream to realize that I already graduated and don’t have to stick around.

(But the other night, I had a dream where I knew which classes I had, how to get there, and understood the curriculum.  I sat down in front of the teacher with all my books and was like, “All right.  Let’s rock this shit.”  Subconscious progress!)

3. School II.  I’m back in high school and have to go down into the catacombs to rescue someone.  To my knowledge, my school didn’t have catacombs.  All we had was a basement where the janitor drank.

4. Stores.  Similar to my school cafeteria dream, I’m stuck in a store forever because I can’t decide what to buy.  By the time I decide, the merchandise has changed into something else or disappeared completely.  Or it costs an insane amount of money, and I buy it anyway before realizing that I’ve just spent my entire house downpayment.

5. Car theft.  How many times is Dream Me going to spend hours looking for her car even though she knows someone has driven off with it?

6. My sister is an asshole.  In these dreams, my sister does something really shitty and everyone in my family blames me.  Worse, they blame me in the meanest ways possible (like calling the police, THANKS DAD) and refuse to believe me no matter what I say.  My sister is no help because she won’t tell anyone it was her.

7. Herding small animals.  I’ve been trusted to take care of a number of small animals (cats, hamsters, bunnies, etc.) and they’re all getting out of their cages.  If you didn’t already know, it is very difficult to tell a bunch of bunnies what to do.

Without consulting any dream books, I think my sleep time activities indicate that I am at turns unprepared for things like adulthood, responsibility, decision-making, and have a really disturbing blame complex.

Again, not surprising, but I’d really like to get a good night’s sleep.