I've simplified it a bit to make it more coherent but everything here was present in the dream.
A woman is giving birth to her adult daughter, again. Five years ago, she had had this same baby before—as a son—but she became separated at birth and never got to raise this baby. Three years later, the baby had returned as an adult woman, with a new name. She wanted to get to know her birth mother, who she had grown up without for twenty eight years. It was strained. This mother wanted her baby son who she had lost only a few years ago, and this strange adult woman wanted her to get to know a fully grown adult, a stranger to her, who was herself looking for an imagined mother she never truly knew.
But now, the mother was trying again. She was pregnant, thanks to modern technology, with the same baby, again. An exact genetic clone. She names the new baby after the adult woman the last one grew into, since she knows already this time that her baby is going to be transgender. One small blessing of her grief. She wants the chance to raise her daughter, which she never got to do before.
But something is wrong, she is giving birth too soon. The baby is born prematurely and must be kept in an in incubator for preemies. Isolated, again, from her mother. Thanks to modern technology, the preemie is hooked up to a VR rig and the mother, the adult original daughter, and her friends, can all visit the preemie in the metaverse and coo over her and give her the love she would normally receive as a newborn infant; so that her first moments are not spent alone. The mother can still be with her child.
But the VR equipment is new, and untested, and it has an incredible consumption of electricity. It draws so much electricity that it causes a power outage for the entire neighborhood. Without power, the hospital cannot run the incubators in the premature birth ward. The preemie will die. The mother will once again lose her chance to raise this baby.
In her grief and rage, she unleashes a plague of frogs. The city becomes a swamp, overrun with frogs frogs frogs. When the electricity grid is restored, she says, she will stop unleashing frogs. But the water and the frogs are interfering with the electric company's ability to restore the electricity grid. The chaos might jeopardize the lives of others, including the five year old version of the real daughter who was born but separated, and lives somewhere in this city, right now.
If the mother continues to grieve the imagined baby she perceives herself as having lost, she will lose the adult daughter who wants to get to know her. To save both versions of her daughter, baby and adult, she must be convinced to stop mourning and lashing out, and to instead accept the possible reality that she will never raise this exact baby, and will have to live with the adult daughter she already has. Perhaps someday she can have another baby, a different baby, but she might never be able to raise this exact baby that she had lost.
I woke up before the conclusion. But it really does feel like a surrealist novella rich with metaphor.
