Baby

In the interpretation of dreams, Baby is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as innocence, new beginnings, vulnerability, and untapped potential.

Common readings

A baby is usually read as new and tender potential, something fragile that needs care, or an innocent and undeveloped part of the self.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

Jung, writing with the classicist Karl Kerényi in essays later collected as Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1949), treats the child, including the dreamed or mythic infant, as a distinct archetypal motif, the child archetype, associated with futurity, vulnerability and the potential for psychic renewal rather than with any single fixed meaning about literal pregnancy or family. This is Jung's own theoretical framework, not a universal dream-key. Popular dream-symbol dictionaries that gloss a baby dream as predicting a literal pregnancy or a coming new opportunity are, as with most entries in the genre, offering an unattributed folk reading with no named source and no mechanism, the pattern this atlas's overview article on the dream-symbol genre identifies as the characteristic failure of the whole tradition.

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.