When you have a dream with a baby in it, or dream that you are a baby, it doesn’t usually have the obvious connotations that you may think, such as that you are going to have a baby. There are some obvious feelings that you may wish to think about before you delve too deep into the symbolism though. Are you feeling helpless like a baby? Do you feel a need to withdraw into an unborn state? Most of us have had some kind of trauma during our childhood, you can pretty much guarantee that everyone you see walking around you in the streets and at work, no matter how confident and together they look, are carrying around emotional baggage connected with their childhood. At lot can be done for your self by considering your inner child on all levels of you being, mental, physical, emotional and environmental, in order for you to heal from any abuse and negative indoctrination you have suffered.
Generally in dreams babies represent your creativity, your ability to give birth to new ideas; the things that you have conceived in your mind and either do, or do not, produce and allow to develop. This means that if you dream of a baby that is lost from you, or you reject it, throw it away or, as is common in dreams, something terrible happens to a baby that is meant to be yours, it can be that you have rejected an idea or suppressed an ability that you possess in some way or other.
Your subconscious mind is aware that you are ignoring your ideas, or that someone else has used them instead of you, or there are fears that someone will steal your ideas if you don’t use them soon. This kind of thing happens a lot more often than we realise in waking life but, unlike the conscious mind, the dreaming unconscious misses little of what is going on in your life – presenting these ideas to you in dreams in the form of sinister characters lurking in shadows and babies being lost to you. These examples are a fair demonstration of just how valuable looking at your dreams can be no matter who you are, a teenager, a businesswoman/man, a lawyer, a teacher or an artist, everyone has the ability to come up with ideas that could change their lives, and everyone has the ability to ignore their own inspiration and miss out on life’s opportunities. Your deeper unconscious mind is not chained down by your self-doubts, your parents’/peers’/partner’s criticisms; it will express itself freely without the interruption of your logical, waking mind.
Your dreams are the expression of your inner child, your unadulterated ingenuity that is unaware of the social restrictions put upon you by your age and life experience. Your unconscious, dreaming mind gives up its knowledge to you freely, without the fear of repercussions and chastisement. Through these dreams you get to the specific or practical details; the heart of a matter, the real truth with no pretensions. You will find yourself leading a healthier and more fulfilled life if you pay attention to these special dreams.
Dreaming that you are pregnant can mean that something is growing, gestating; that something you have done in your waking life has figuratively sown the seeds of an idea that is now beginning to grow – you now have the responsibility to nurture it to fruition. If the pregnancy is an easy one it signifies that your unconscious believes all is going well; if the dream pregnancy is difficult and arduous it means that your unconscious believes you will need to work hard for you ‘child’ to grow, that difficulties are perceived. That last example is particularly important for you because it will most likely be trying to point something out to you that you are missing, some aspect of the incubation dream could be trying to show you a solution that you have ignored or disregarded.
An actual birth in your dream means that your idea is born and that now is the time to nurture your ideas and watch them grow. If you dream that your baby was still-born or that you had an abortion it could show that you have allowed one of your ideas or talents to pass you by or die, disposed of it before it had a chance to grow. The dreaming mind will often use puns and wordplay, so something like a ‘miscarriage of justice’ may be significant.
Babies are innocent, they are in fact the ultimate symbol of the un-carved block of Taoism, the ultimate innocence of life; a baby is a book full of blank pages, just waiting for life’s story to be written on its pages; babies can be shaped throughout their upbringing by anyone who wishes to shape them, we must take care to ensure they are shaped the way we wish them to be, in a way that we see fit. When we need self-expression and assertion, babies speak to us in our dreams.