New mothers must be collectors of broken sleep, eagerly taking a sliver here, a shard there – whatever they can get.

Now that my baby is four months old, she’s finally sleeping at night. Still, she wakes me every two hours to nurse. She is half asleep while she feeds and I am always nodding off. In the few seconds it takes for my sinking head or my nursing baby to summon me back, I’ll have a momentary dream. A micro-dream. A nano-nap. No more intricate dreams of forgetting to do my homework or going to prom in a maternity dress. These dreams are all business: snapshots of everyday life. Once it may be a view of my husband lifting the baby out of her crib. Another time, I glimpse a lump in bed beside me and realize it’s my baby buried in our blankets (a terrifying dream.) But usually I simply dream that she’s nursing. A dream of mere reality: no more, no less.

How do I even know that I’m dreaming? The details are off. And in these cases, the switch from dreaming to wakefulness can be particularly strange. Once the transition felt as seamless as a change of camera shots in a television show. One moment I was looking down at my nursing baby; the next, she was flipped (mirror-reversed) in my arms and her head was noticeably smaller! Never before have I had such an immediate comparison between the mind’s eye and the naked eye, nor realized how very similar they feel. And never before have I had such uninventive, literal dreams. It’s as if I can’t muster the energy to dream up anything better.

In the face of my lackluster dreaming, I am all the more fascinated by the rich dream life of my daughter. From the day she was born I’ve watched her smile, pout, and wince and heard her scream and giggle madly in her sleep. In fact, she smiled in her sleep months before she gave us her first waking smile. Physicians have observed rapid eye movements in fetuses, suggesting that babies dream in the womb. But what are they dreaming of? Is it limited to what they know: heartbeats and jostling and amniotic fluid? Or perhaps their dreams are wilder than our own, unconstrained by the realities of life on this earth. After all, the infant brain contains legions of unpruned synapses and far more neurons than that of an adult. Who’s to say what sort of fantasy it might come up with?

Whatever sort of dreams a newborn has, we don’t remember them as adults. By late infancy, we’ve already pruned enough synapses and experienced enough of the world to have a basic vocabulary for our dreams. An adult’s dream may create some odd combinations – eyeballs growing on trees or hats that unfurl into snakes – but the vocabulary, the unitary elements, are fixed. Eyeballs, trees, hats, snakes. Grow, unfurl. Our potential dreamscapes are wholly constrained by the details of our waking existence.

As my baby examines new places and things, I am reminded that she’s cobbling together her own vocabulary of the world. She will store away sensations, objects, creatures, actions, concepts, cultures, and myths. A knowledge that the sun shines from above and plants sprout from below. That rivers run and lakes loiter. That caterpillars turn into butterflies and never the other way around. For better or for worse, her future dreams will be shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our funny little world.