In My Dreams...

I dream of crying babies, and they've invaded Elaine's dreams as well. In those blissful few moments after Owen has finally drifted off to sleep, what does my exhausted mind choose to subject me to? More crying, and the crying is accompanied by strange abstract images that don't specifically resemble babies, but give the distinct impression of a baby's movement just as it startles itself and begins the jerky arm and leg movements that accompany a crying jag.

Now this has happened to me before, not so much with the babies, but with Edgeworth boxes and separating hyperplanes. The summer after my first year in grad school, when I was studying 18 hours a day for my micro and macro comps, the equations and formulas that filled my days also permeated my dreams. (Also, for a short time during my third year in grad school, thanks to Bill and John, all my dreams were about Quake, but that's another story).

What surprises me about the latest set of dreams is that for the most part, my days are not filled with crying babies. So far, thankfully, Owen hasn't been very colicky. Most of his crying has been of the "I'm hungry", "I'm wet", "I'm poopy", "I need to be burped", "I want to be held", or "I want to feel like I'm back in the womb" varieties. Figure out what he wants, satisfy his needs, and he's happy again. Occasionally though, he cries for reasons I can't decipher, and that can leave quite an impression on your mind, particularly when it happens at 3 am.

From an evolutionary perspective, we're all programmed to find our infants adorable and to hark to their every cry. They're relatively helpless in this world, and if we didn't jump at their every cry, they'd end up starving and we'd be eaten by the lions. So when he drifts off to sleep, and I begin to follow, it's not a contentedly sleeping baby that joins me in my dreams, but the cry that calls me to action.