The Nightmares of a Mother

I've been having nightmares for the past few days. I don't have many nightmares, generally, so these are really standing out to me in a scary, disturbing way. I have a lot of silly, wacky, surreal dreams usually, or dreams that don't make sense, or an very rare sex dream (very very rare) about having sex with someone I am not even remotely attracted to. In the sex dreams I'm always extremely skinny, and extremely HOT. That's how I know they aren't real.
But I digress.
For the past week, with regularity, I'm dreaming about dead babies.
Not my babies - no fears, I'm not about to snap and do something rash.
I'm having two distinct dreams, the second of which has lots of themes and variations but I always know it's the same dream.
In the first dream, I'm standing on a dock. A few hundred yards away from me is a big flat pontoon with several helicopters parked on it. I know, somehow, that this is a helicopter landing pad - a floating one. I'm waiting on a helicopter to come and get me. While I'm waiting I'm trying to figure out how you get to the pontoon over there? Do we have to swim? Then my helicopter comes flying in. It's full of toddlers. And as it lands it just misses the pontoon and plunges into the ocean. I'm leaping into the water - the blades have slowed remarkably because of the water -in my dream I knew this would happen, and I swim inside and get two toddlers and bring them up to the surface, where I hand them to someone on the pontoon. I'm screaming that I need more help. There are more of them, there's still air inside, someone please help me. It's sinking. And no one will move. I go back and bring up two more. And two more. And then I can't find any more alive so I start bringing them up dead and screaming for CPR. I bring the last of them up and I'm screaming in this dream but it isn't loud. I'm just pleading for someone else to help me with CPR, I can't do all of these toddlers myself. I need someone to do chest compressions. I keep crying that I can't keep this up, I can't do this. There are too many of them and they're doing to stay dead if someone doesn't help me.
And then I wake up.

The other dream I am having involves the baby that died between me and my brother Matt. In this dream I've gone to the cemetary just to look at the burial places of my loved ones and they've messed up the baby row. If you haven't ever seen it - most cemetaries have a special area for babies and children to be buried. It's possibly the saddest place you'll ever see, so be happy you haven't been there, or ever had to be there. I used to drive through the cemetary once in a while, just to say hello, pay respects to my dead, make sure all was as it should be, and to check that the baby's marker was where it was supposed to be. Her marker is metal, and unfortunately moveable. I've been known to put it back where it goes, although I haven't been back for years now, so who knows where it is.
But in my dream, they've put a snack bar right in the middle of the row where the babies are buried. And although her marker is there, I can't tell where it goes anymore because they destroyed the concrete wall that was all along the baby wall. My dad notched it with his keys the day we buried her, and showed me, so that we would always be able to tell if her marker was in the right place. In this dream, after discovering the snack bar (and purchasing a coke, because who am I NOT to support the baby cemetary snack bar) I spend the rest of my time trying to determine where my sister is buried now. The entire dream is like that, me talking to people who don't understand why I care and what does it matter - it's been 30+ years so they don't understand why it would matter to me.
In my dream I don't know why, I just always felt like (and this is true in real life) that my dad showed me the notch in the concrete for a reason. So that someone would know. And now no one knew. In my dream it's more about her being lost than dead. Which, at least in my dream, is worse.