Women on TikTok say they're dreaming about giving birth and wake up 'grieving' their baby. A psychologist explains the fascinating phenomenon.

• Young women are turning to TikTok to talk about having babies in their dreams — and the real loss they experience when they wake up. 
• Often tagged #dreambabies, these videos are a part of a growing community online.
• A psychologist told Insider that these dreams can mean the OP is working through grief or a yearning to be a parent.

You may already be familiar with a subculture on TikTok called "DreamTok," where people openly talk about their fantastical and funny dreams. Some even try to turn them into skits.

There's now a more serious microgenre of those videos where young women are sharing dreams in which they give birth to a child. Often tagged "dream babies," women say they feel real sadness and grief after waking up and realizing the child was imagined. Others say they've had the same dream over and over, and have even become attached to the dream baby.

In a video posted in December, a woman shared an extremely detailed dream she had wherein she was laying in a hammock with her imaginary baby and said she could feel it breathing on her chest. She said she was cradling the baby and woke up lying in a similar position before realizing the baby wasn't real.

"How do you mourn someone who never existed?" user @melamamiii captioned the video that's been viewed over half a million times.

In another TikTok that went viral in January, user @usherusheryeahhman said she's still attached to a baby she dreamt about over a year ago. ""Honestly the first week after it was actually so painful but couldn't tell anyone because they'd think I was insane," she wrote in a comment.

Psychologists believe "dream babies" could be interpreted in several meaningful ways. While it's still a new and burgeoning genre online, these dreams — and the urge to share them with others — could help people work through attachment issues and loss.

A TikToker says waking up from these dreams feels like 'a state of grief'

Hailey Case has dreams about giving birth or having a baby about two-to-three times a month, she told Insider. The Kansas State University student said it's "incredibly jarring" to wake up from a dream that feels so real. 

"When you have a dream baby [it] just feels instinctually maternal, so waking up my body knows it's awake, but my mind is trying to catch up," she said. 

Inspired by other women posting about their dream babies, Case decided to share hers in December. Her TikTok received 15,000 views and over a dozen comments from people saying they've experienced something similar. While she felt bonded with others, it also made her more glum.

"The response made me really sad, scrolling through the comments of people who were sharing the name of their dream baby, saying it felt so real," she said. "The intense emotion feels a little surreal because we separate dreams from reality really easily."

She said it's difficult to rationalize that dissonance when the dream can instill a real, heavy emotional feeling.

"It feels like a state of grief, in some sense of the word," she said.

Although people have long shared dreams about having babies, the phenomenon seems to have grown on TikTok over the last few months. It now has its own hashtag with multiple viral videos.

The videos have mostly bonded young women who say they desperately want to have children. However, it's also had an adverse effect for some. In one video from January, a creator said her "dream baby" confirmed to her that she never wants children. 

A psychologist believes the 'dream baby' could be a stand-in for other kinds of attachment and loss

Dr. Dylan Selterman, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in dreams and social relationships, told Insider that there's no research yet on these kinds of dreams and their associated grief. But he hypothesizes that it could be a vehicle for women to explore motherhood, or life and loss in a completely different context.

"It may be the case that people are prone to feelings of grief or loss because the baby in the dream corresponds to another child or family figure in the person's life," Selterman said. "Perhaps this is their mind's way of coping with a different type of loss."

He also theorized that what people call an "attachment" to a fictional or dream baby could simply mean that they yearn to be mothers.

According to Selterman, there's enough research to show that sharing dreams creates social bonds so he's not surprised to know that dream babies have become so popular on the app.

Case said she's seen a surge in dream baby videos over the last few months. Seeing other people post about it has potentially destigmatized these dreams, since it "feels weird" to "admit that you are saddened by a dream experience," she said.  

 "I don't know if it popped up out of nowhere or someone suddenly decided to share, and everyone else felt the courage to share," she said.