Kindell, a 21-year-old from Clearwater Beach, Florida, is not looking to have kids anytime soon.
But for the last four years, she’s had intense recurring dreams about a hypothetical baby. In the earliest iterations of the dream, the baby was a newborn lying on the couch while Kindell was folding laundry or doing other chores.
In successive dreams, the baby has gotten older. Meanwhile, though Kindell isn’t pining for children, she said the “gut feeling” that it really is her child has gotten more intense.
“One of the latest ‘dream baby’ dreams I can remember is walking down a sidewalk holding a 4- or 5-year-old girl’s hand and we’re just talking about random things like colors and farm animals,” said Kindell, who asked to use her first name only to protect her privacy.
One weird detail is that she never sees the baby’s face ― the child is facing away from her or their face is blurred.
Kindell said she feels inexplicably sad every time she wakes up from these baby-centric dreams.
“I wake up so content and happy and then after three seconds I realize that it’s a dream and I have a pit in my stomach that lingers for at least the rest of the day,” she said. “I honestly feel kind of embarrassed about it because how can I miss a baby that doesn’t exist? But I do.”
Talk of dream babies has been all over TikTok, with young women ― most of whom say they’re not looking to get pregnant ― detailing the realistic dreams they’ve had of caring for a baby. Currently, the hashtag #dreambaby has 4.8 million views on TikTok. (Of course, there are probably just as many women having these dreams who wake up deeply relieved they’re still child-free, but they’re not posting about it.)
Kindell is among those who recounted her dream on TikTok: