The other night I had a dream that I gave birth to a ferret.
At first it didn’t seem like a ferret, it seemed like a human baby, only very, very small. Over the course of the next couple of hours, and just as I was growing to love my miniature baby, it changed to resemble a little grey mouse, and it ran around on the bed, getting lost in the sheets.
Someone advised me that if I wanted it to behave, I would have to breastfeed it, so I retrieved the tiny thing with the distinctly non-human features – fur, pointy nose, four legs, tail – and when I pulled it from the sheets it was a sleek, sinister-looking, black and white ferret.
I was very afraid that its teeth would hurt when I began breastfeeding, so I made excuses. “I don’t think my milk has come in yet,” I said. “You have to let it suck; then the milk will come,” someone (the same Someone) replied.
So I brought its sneering rodent mouth to my breast and let it sink its teeth into my nipple. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Somehow I could see inside my breast, like a cross-section of what was happening inside, and as the ferret sucked, I noticed drops of red blood pooling just behind my nipple. He sucked and sneered, and my breast filled with blood. He kept sucking. Slowly, drops of milk began to form as he pulled at my breast, and soon the milk was flowing.
I don’t have anything insightful to share about this dream. I’m not sure what significance it has, if any, except that I had been trying to explain to someone that day what it feels like to have a baby kicking inside you, and I told them about the quote I had read that described it as feeling like having a bag of ferrets in your stomach.
I do remember feeling a sense of loss in the dream for the human baby I had thought I would have. I remember thinking, “I don’t think I would have gone through all the trouble of being pregnant if I had known it was going to be a ferret.”
