Birth dreams have been read since antiquity with the dreamer's actual circumstances firmly in view. The ancient handbooks treated dreams of childbirth chiefly as they concerned women who were or might be expecting, and modern research confirms the ordinary version: pregnancy brings vivid, well remembered dreams, and dreams of labour, arrival and the new child are common accompaniments of the waiting itself, needing no symbolism at all.
Where no literal birth is in prospect, the psychological traditions take over. Freud's school linked birth imagery with water, emergence and rescue from water, folding it into the theory of the dream's regressive reach toward earliest experience. The Jungian tradition raised the stakes: in the work Jung published with the mythologist Karl Kerenyi on the child archetype, the newborn appears as one of the great recurring figures of myth and dream alike, the image of the new possibility that arrives small, vulnerable and ahead of its time, and must be protected before it can be understood.
The popular dictionaries compress all of this into the reading of new beginnings, a project, an idea, a self in the making. The compression is not wrong so much as flat; the traditions behind it disagree about what is being born, and the atlas records their readings as theirs.