Birth

In the interpretation of dreams, Birth is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as new beginnings, a fresh project, idea, or aspect of the self emerging.

Common readings

Birth is commonly read as the arrival of something new in the dreamer's life, a project, a relationship or a newly surfacing side 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.

What changes the reading

Interpreters distinguish giving birth in a dream, watching a birth and being newly born oneself, and they ask what stage the dream shows, labour, arrival or the first sight of the child. For a dreamer who is actually expecting a child the image is usually read first as ordinary anticipation, vivid pregnancy dreams being well documented, and only after that as symbol. When nothing in waking life is literally being born, the birth is commonly taken to announce something beginning that will need tending before it can stand on its own.

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.