One reported dream recurs so often that it has become a fixture of the modern literature: the dreamer remembers, suddenly, a baby they were responsible for and have forgotten, unfed, left in a drawer or another room, sometimes for years, yet somehow alive. Interpreters in the psychological traditions read it, with unusual agreement, toward some capacity or claim of the dreamer's own life left untended, and the relief of the dream's ending, the child alive after all, as the point: what was neglected has survived the neglect.
The grand version of the reading comes from the Jungian tradition. In the essays Jung published with Karl Kerenyi on the mythology of the child archetype, the divine child of myth, born small, endangered and ahead of its time, Moses in the basket, the infant Zeus hidden, the child of the nativity, is the figure of the future itself, the new thing the present cannot yet protect. A dream baby, on this reading, is never only a baby; it is what is coming into being.
Freud's school read dream infants within its own theory, sometimes bluntly, and the folk dictionaries read babies toward innocence and good news. As with every image in this atlas, these are the traditions' readings, strongest where the dreamer's waking life shows something newly born and needing care.