‘90s FAMILY : The Pregnancy Zone : A woman who’s expecting a baby can look forward to dreams filled with beasts, disasters and water, water and more water.

By day, Sharon Cordero was a picture of pregnant bliss. This was a planned baby. She was eager to be a new mother. She even escaped pregnancy’s usual dose of emotional zig-zagging.

Then, the long night came.

“My dreams were really hectic, fast, jumbled. They were awful nightmares. But I couldn’t remember what happened. Maybe I didn’t want to remember what it was,” said Cordero of West Hollywood, now the mother of a healthy infant boy. “It was so jumbled. It was like a piece of old television film. You know how old movies break and sputter? It was like that.”

In short, it was normal.

Pregnancy dreams are among the strangest women experience, says psychologist Patricia Maybruck, author of “Pregnancy and Dreams” (Tarcher, 1989). Typically, they are filled with a parade of animals, half-animal babies, death scenes, burglars, blood, natural disasters, philandering mates--and water, water and more water.

“They are different from those of any other group of women. They are very bizarre and vivid. And they are nightmarish,” said Maybruck, who lives leads dream study groups in St. Helena, Calif.

As if morning sickness and bloated ankles weren’t enough. But this bit of weirdness has a purpose, dream scholars say. Dreams open doors to the murky subconscious, where people bury worries and fears they don’t want to face in the light of day. Pregnancy intensifies the emotional and mental cross-fire. Frans Bauer, a dream scholar and lecturer at Loyola Marymount University, considers that a gift of free therapy.

“Because dreams are so vivid during pregnancy, that’s the time that people become aware that dreams have something useful to say to them, which is actually always the case,” Bauer said.

But if they are so important, why don’t the dreams get to the point? Too often, the dreams are puzzling mixes of “Twilight Zone” scripts and Stephen King tales.

“We are so focused in our thinking, we can see things only one way (while awake),” Bauer said. “It’s only through symbols that the enormity of the event can be expressed. Normal language is limiting.”

The language of pregnancy dreams at least is relatively predictable, said Maybruck, who analyzed 1,000 dreams of 70 pregnant women.

Ordinarily, she won’t assign universal meanings to common dream images and themes. But pregnant women’s dreams are strikingly similar because pregnancy spawns similar concerns, feelings and experiences, Maybruck said.

Thus enter the animals. First to arrive in early pregnancy are the bunnies, kittens and puppies. Gradually the fuzzy-wuzzies give way to bigger, bouncier critters until the third trimester, when women often dream of giving birth to lions and tigers.

Animal images usually relate to how a woman views the growing fetus, Maybruck said. The untamed beasts arrive when the mother feels ponderous and may be anxious about the impending responsibility of managing a newborn.

Architecture and plants routinely appear and represent the woman’s growing body, Maybruck said. Like the animals, they gain stature as the pregnancy progresses, evolving from houses and vines to skyscrapers and gardens.

“By the third trimester, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a frequent one if you can believe it,” she said.

And then there is the water. Overflowing toilets and washing machines fill the night picture in the first trimester. By the end of the pregnancy, the mother-to-be might wake feeling as if she has floated down a placid river or ridden out a hurricane.

And the reason is? Amniotic fluid, Maybruck said. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung also found water to be a universal dream symbol for creation.

Mary Vergilio of Canyon Lake found water dreams to be a wild ride. Her son is 10, but the memories of her seagoing pregnancy dreams are as vivid as ever.

“I was a whale migrating. I was one in a pod. I remember raising myself up to breathe and going back down. I was experiencing breathing without breathing through my nose or mouth. We were migrating somewhere. I remember the coldness of the water, the roll of the ocean,” Vergilio said. “It was the only non-nightmare. I remember a very nice feeling about it.”

Most of her dreams were hellish scenes of holocaust, concentration camps, fires, disasters and breathless running. In retrospect, she attributes them to the breakup of her first marriage and money worries. At the time, she said, her days were too full to give her nocturnal woes much attention.

Women would be wise to heed nightmares, said Brea hypnotherapist Sandra Dileo, who specializes in self-hypnosis as a relaxation technique for childbirth. Nightmares are often clues to what anxieties a woman needs to discuss with her partner, nurse-midwife or physician. Secondly, she can change them.

“Say, ‘In my dreams tonight I will be more aware that it is a dream and I will be able to either leave it or create a positive outcome,’ ” Dileo said.

Consider it a dress rehearsal that just might help in the end. Maybruck found that women who were most assertive in their dreams had shorter labors. Women who educated themselves early about pregnancy, labor and delivery were able to allay at least some of their worries.

“Once women are really confident about the pregnancy and delivery, their dreams will change,” Maybruck said. “Then they begin to have these incredible, beautiful dreams. Some women dream they are in the womb swimming around with the baby. For some, they’re just beautiful dreams, almost spiritual dreams.”

No matter how emotionally, physically and mentally ready women are to give birth, their childbirth dreams aren’t likely to ever match the jolly scenes fathers can dream up.

“Expectant fathers’ dreams are quite similar to their wives,” she said. “Except for their delivery dreams. They often dream of movie stars coming in to congratulate them with cigars and champagne. Mothers never have those dreams.”