22-year-old Akira Tyler has always been a vivid dreamer. But recently, one has stood out more than the rest. In the past two years, she has had several dreams that she’s a mother to a baby boy. In the most recent version of the dream, Tyler woke up with her arms cradling her chest, as if she was still holding the baby.
“I can never forget baby dreams - they feel so real. You have a baby, it looks like you and you’re holding it,” she says. “There’s never been a question about whose baby it is, I just intrinsically know that it’s mine.”
Tyler is not alone. The hashtag #dreambaby currently has 4.7m views on TikTok, with clips detailing similar dreams in which people care for babies or young children.
Tyler’s (username @melamamii) video describing her dream quickly went viral, receiving over 558,000 views, 118,000 likes and hundreds of comments from people who had also experienced baby dreams.
One user commented: “I don’t even want kids, but them dream babies hit different.” Others even report having several dreams about the same baby.
Milly*, 28, says that the baby she dreams about “always looks the same” with blonde hair and blue eyes. “In the dreams, I care for, and look after, the baby. I always know it’s mine,” she adds.
One of the common themes TikTokers discuss in the videos is an intense sadness when they wake up and realise the baby doesn’t exist.
“It’s very odd, because there’s a sense of loss, but it’s a loss of something you never had, so it’s almost indescribable. How can I miss something that was never tangible?” says Tyler.
When Emma Davies, 24, woke up from her baby dream she experienced a feeling akin to grief. “When you dream something so vividly and so emotionally I think there’s a part of your psyche that can’t quite differentiate between the dream world and reality,” she says. “You almost have to cope with what felt real, not being real.”
As the baby dream phenomenon grows on TikTok, many users are wondering: what do they really mean?
It’s hard to know for sure. Dreams are, by their nature, tricky to research because you can only experience your own. Even when you wake up and remember a dream, it’s based on memory.
One theory is that dreams could be a mechanism for our brains to process stress and trauma. This is highlighted by Professor Matthew Walker in his book Why We Sleep, where he explores the possibility of dreams as a type of ‘overnight therapy’ – the idea that dreams help us to process difficult emotional experiences we have during the day.
Psychologist Linda Blair explains that dream symbols are usually specific to each individual, but there are some themes. “If you get a strong emotion - negative or positive - it’s probably something the part of you you’re not aware of is working on, in preparation for you to address it consciously,” she explains.
“One of the ways I start off is to say, let’s look at the dream as if everyone in it is a different aspect of you.”
As Blair sees it, there are three possible interpretations of baby dreams. These, she says, are different to pregnancy dreams, which usually mean you’re about to make a decision to do something different in your life.
“One interpretation is that the life they could have had if they had children is not going to survive. Another is that the child that I imagined I would have, especially if already pregnant, is now not going to happen, because this child will be unlike any other child in the world […] that would give you a really strong emotional response,” she says.
“Finally [...] if you dream of a child and then it dies, so does your child in you - the freedom you have to do whatever you want, whenever you want,” adding that this might happen if you’re pregnant, or wanting to get pregnant.
Indeed, these dreams come at a time when more millennials and Gen Z are grappling with the prospect of a childfree future, whether by choice or not.
A YouGov poll undertaken in 2020 found that one in eight (13%) of Britons between the ages of 18 and 23 who are not already parents say they don’t ever want to have kids, while another 30% say they don’t want children currently but might be open to having children at some point in the future.
Figures from the US tell a similar story. A 2021 study by Pew Research Center study shows 44% of non-parents aged 18 to 49 don’t think they will have children, up from 37% in 2018. Some of the reasons for not wanting children listed in the YouGov poll include high costs (10%), overpopulation (9%) and climate change (5%).
Like many of her generation, Tyler describes herself as “on the fence” about having children. “I’m at a point where if I have kids, I’m fine, if I don’t have kids, I’m fine,” she says. “I see the kind of world I would be bringing my child into outside of me being a mother, with society and inflation and all those things… the future might not be beneficial to them.”
Could these conflicted emotions towards children in our waking lives be influencing our dreams? It’s a possibility, says Blair.
“There’s a death of a me that could have been, a mother [...] It’s a life I could have had that I’m not going to have now, I’ve chosen something else. That could explain the sense of loss they have when they wake up.”
Milly speculates her baby dreams could be tied to her own concerns about having children. She has systemic lupus, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks its own healthy tissue, and explains that she will need to stop taking her medication when she plans to have children, which could cause the illness to become overactive.
“I don’t have the means to have a child at the moment. If I could, I probably would,” she shares, adding that it is “reassuring” to see other people experience similar dreams on TikTok.
There could be some science behind why so many TikTokers are choosing to share their dreams on #dreamtok, too.
Research undertaken in 2012 shows that about 15% of dreams are shared - mainly with romantic partners, friends and relatives. Mark Blagrove, a Professor of Psychology at Swansea University, has studied the effects that sharing dreams has on us - in particular, on feelings of empathy. The research, outlined in his book with Julia Lockheart, The Science and Art of Dreaming, found that when somebody shares a dream, the people they discuss it with experience increased empathy towards the dream sharer.
“That led us to the possibility that maybe we are producing dreams not just to process our emotions and memories in the night, but to tell them, and disclose ourselves to other people, in an unwitting way,” he explains.
“That seems to be what these TikTokers are doing. They’re having the dream, and the main effect is that they are able to disclose themselves to a large number of other people, who start to empathise with them.”
While for some people the phrase ‘it was only a dream’ rings true, for others, the sense of loss after a baby dream can leave a lasting impact.
Dr. Joshua Black, a leading researcher in the realm of grief dreams, explains that the grief experienced in a dream feels real because the love feels real. “The great mystery I see is how people are experiencing such profound moments of love in a dream,” he states. “Moments that they may have never felt to that same extent in waking life… an experience that may not be based on a memory, but being lived for the first time.”
Whatever is behind the baby dreams, the #dreamtok community provides a safe space for TikTokers to share their experiences. “It’s reassuring to see that other women experience similar feelings, and that I’m not weird for having these kinds of dreams,” Milly adds.