dreaming

What Does It Mean If You’re Having Dreams About Babies?

Baby girl lying down and smiling
Hello, baby, what do you mean? Photo: Getty Images/Tuan Tran

A familiar dream conceit: I suddenly, inexplicably, find myself in possession of a baby, an alarming discovery for me, a person who — in waking life — has no aspirations toward motherhood. Just where did I get this baby, hmmm? Sometimes I understand the baby to be my own; sometimes, I understand it to be someone else’s. Either way, it makes for a stressful sleep.

My literal interpretation may miss the point, though. According to professional dream analyst and author Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, baby dreams tend to symbolize things coming to fruition — the culmination of a personal goal and a new start, a sort of follow-up to a pregnancy dream. “Usually baby dreams are a really positive sign that represent growth or development, either with you personally or with something that you’re working on,” Loewenberg says. “It’s a messge from your subconscious saying this new thing is great, it’s time to focus and nurture it. It’s time to get busy.”

Maybe you’ve just finished school and finally gotten a degree; maybe you’ve finished a book and must now brace for publication; maybe you are finally launching your much-anticipated nonprofit entity after some high-profile false starts. “Even a new relationship can show up in your dream in the form of a baby,” Loewenberg says. Whatever the long-awaited, labored-upon item is, your subconscious, she explains, wants you to “understand the potential of it, and the need to nurture it and focus on it so it can grow.”

Autumn Fourkiller, Indigenous mystic and writer behind the Dream Interpretation for Dummies newsletter, says, “Dreams about babies are the logical conclusion to a pregnancy dream. To me, this is a sign that something has come to fruition. Pregnancy is about incubation, about keeping something inside, and babies are the showcasing of something, the proof of existence, if you will. This logic also applies to dreams.”

Here’s what it means if you’re dreaming about babies.

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If you dream about a sick baby …

Say your dream baby has a fever, or heavy infantile sneezes: that tells you “something new in your life isn’t going well,” Loewenberg says. “Maybe it’s a new relationship in your life that isn’t healthy, or maybe you’ve got this project that you’ve been working on and it doesn’t seem to be going well. Your subconscious will show it to you in the form of a sick baby so you can find ways to breathe new life into the project or the relationship,” or whatever the ailing thing is.

Fourkiller adds that dreams are a reminder that something in your life needs to be taken care of. “If you’re dreaming about sick babies, I would say that you need to pay special care or attention to yourself or your current projects. Your brain may be venting those anxieties or it could be telling you something needs to be adjusted.”

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If the baby won’t stop crying …

Similarly, if your dream baby is crying inconsolably, “That’s a very good indication that there is some element of this new thing in your life that needs your attention,” Loewenberg explains. “There’s some element that needs to be fed, some element you need to put more focus on. So ask yourself: this new thing in my life — this new job, this new project, this new relationship, this new thing — what area of it do I need to focus on more?” The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

A colicky baby could also have a more literal meaning: “Ask yourself if you or anyone involved in this new element of your life is being a baby about it.”

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If you dream about finding an abandoned baby …

According to Loewenberg, this could be your mind prodding you to revisit a task you’ve abandoned in real life: “There’s some idea or project you’ve neglected, like maybe something you had started working on a year or two ago that you put aside and never got back to, so your subconscious is saying, Hey, remember this? This was your baby for a while. Let’s get back to it.

Fourkiller agrees. “Dreaming of an abandoned baby is a frankly freaky way of your subconscious delivering something you have neglected or forgotten back to your proverbial doorstep,” she tells the Cut. “It’s obviously important!”

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If you dream that you have abandoned or lost a baby …

“This, to me, signals that you are neglecting some facet of yourself, of your body, spirit, Fourkiller says. “Or that you’ve let yourself defer an important dream.” If you are having trouble pinpointing the root of your particular forgotten baby dream, Fourkiller has suggestions. “Meditation is always a good thing. If you’re a more esoteric dreamer, well, you can’t go wrong with divination either,” she says. “Divination is, in simple terms, the process of seeking knowledge through non-earthly means. This can include reading tarot, astrology, and the like. Even if you don’t believe in them, they can be seen as systems to organize human experience. For example, one could read the Major Arcana as the Jungian archetypes and the court cards as traditional roles in the family system.” In addition to divination and meditation, Fourkiller also says putting pen to paper is never a bad idea. “You can also make note of recurrences of themes in your dream journal to try and piece together the puzzle.”

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If you dream that your baby is in the hospital …

If you dream about a newborn in a hospital, that may indicate “there’s something new in your life that needs healing,” per Loewenberg. Is there a problem in a new relationship that needs fixing? A new idea you’ve been kicking around needs adjusting before you put it in action?

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If you have children and you dream that they’re babies again …

Parents who dream their children, particularly their adult children, have reverted to babies may want to assess any tendencies toward helicopter parenting. According to Loewenberg, this is a very common dream theme, and it typically means that “you are still babying [your kids] to some degree. Maybe your child is married but you’re still calling and making sure they’re wearing their sweater in the morning.”

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If you dream about a baby with a full set of teeth …

Apparently, this startling visual comes up a lot in dreams. If you’re pregnant and, in your dream, you give birth to a baby with a full set of chompers, “that is reflective of your desire to finally have this baby and finally communicate with it,” Loewenberg believes. “Teeth in dreams are all about communication. If you get that dream and you’re not pregnant, or trying to get pregnant, that would indicate you’ve given birth to a new way of communicating with someone. How are you communicating differently lately?” Do you find yourself babbling exclusively about this denture baby prowling your dreams? It would be understandable if so. It’s a haunting image.

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If you find yourself with a baby you didn’t want, or isn’t yours …

My dream baby scenario may indicate that I sense myself to have inherited a problem I don’t want to manage. “The thought process is what you need to focus on: what are you currently dealing with right now that you didn’t ask to deal with,” Loewenberg says. Ask yourself: “why am I in this situation [if] I don’t want to be in this situation?” That may help you pinpoint a similar scenario in waking life, which in turn brings you one step closer to resolving the issue.

Likewise, if your dream self is caring for a baby that does not belong to you, according to Loewenberg, that suggests you may have taken on responsibility for someone else’s project. “Maybe you’re trying to help a friend get their business off the ground, or maybe someone you work with has asked you to help them with their project,” she explains. “Just ask yourself: what are you feeling responsible for right now that you did not generate, and is it worth it for you to continue nurturing this project?”

The takeaway: No matter what form your dream takes, Fourkiller urges you to examine the waking world for clues as to what it was actually about. “Are you trying for a baby? Are you afraid of pregnancy? Did you just start birth control? Once those facts are established, we can then move into the subconscious. Pregnancy and baby dreams, if they are not about actual infants, are almost exclusively about what we house and store inside our bodies. Is it malicious? Is it good and creative? Are we overjoyed to be bringing it into the world? Or are we afraid?”

Even if you yourself have a baby, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the dream has anything to do with your child. “It doesn’t have to be a direct one-to-one,” Fourkiller says. “I would start thinking about what you’ve recently ‘birthed,’ for lack of a better term, how it is being received, and what your instincts are toward it.”

While doing all of this reflection, Fourkiller also recommends picking up a pen and paper. “Write things down,” she advises. “Explore the themes within. How did you feel about the baby? Were you protecting it? Shunning it?”

She ends by noting dreams about babies may be more prevalent in our post-Roe world. “Baby dreams might see an uptick given the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but also it is common to have baby dreams when having finished working on a big project or worried about what it is you are showcasing to the world.”

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