Hormones are a funny thing. I know this because I’m not a dreamer. When I was a kid I had the typical nightmares and occasionally would yell out at night. But pretty much since childhood, I drift off at night and experience a split-second of blackness before I am awakened by the sound of my alarm eight hours later.

I am convinced that during pregnancy certain hormones are shared (or produced in equilibrium) by mother to father by means of sweat while asleep, physiological connection, or possibly some sort of brainwave interaction we don’t yet understand. Whatever it is, over the past nine months I have experienced it and it has reversed my realization of just how in-control of my mind I really am.

I guess that old saying “mind over matter” holds little truth. The mind is matter. We’re simply made of chemicals, which found themselves in the proper combinations in a vast universe and came together to create our consciousness. I though I understood myself, but we are no more in-control than the asteroid circling the galaxy, bound by gravity and guided by mass and energy.

Anyways I’ve never really been a dreamer. However peculiar, lately I have been dreaming of Lionfish. Bright, vivid and entrancing visions of packs of the hungry critters swimming below me in pools fill my head at night. True, the baby has been very much on my mind, and there’s likely some primitive connection between raw nature and parenthood … but Lionfish? Really? Couldn’t it be cute little Lion cubs or something?

I’ve arrived at a quandary: why am I suddenly having trouble sleeping? And why, when I do fall asleep, does my unconscious mind entertain me with images of swirling schools of Lionfish in a pool below me?

I can only find one explanation: It must be the hormones.