Some dreams arrive in the middle of a story already finished: no waiting, no hospital, just the weight of a newborn suddenly in your arms. Others are all labour, hours of it, and end before the child appears. Birth dreams come to people who are pregnant, people who have never been, and people who never can be, and they tend to leave a strong feeling behind, relief or fear, wonder or exhaustion.
The old dream books took the subject seriously. In the West and in Japan, the birth of a child was one of the few dreams the books read in fine detail: who gave birth, whether the child was a boy or a girl, whether two arrived at once.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Giving birth | Fortunate circumstances and a safe delivery | Miller 1901 |
| A newborn boy or girl | Great good fortune | Zhougong dream book, 1880 |
| Giving birth to a boy | Falling ill | Yume handan jikkensho, 1908 |
| Giving birth to a girl | Losing property | Yume handan jikkensho, 1908 |
| Holding the newborn | Rising in the world | Yume handan jikkensho, 1908 |
| Twins or triplets | Quarrels; for an official, a rise in rank | Yume handan, 1906 |
| Someone else giving birth to a boy | A child of one's own | Yume handan jikkensho, 1908 |
| A difficult labour | No entry in any book cited here | none |
What does it mean to dream about giving birth?
Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) gives birth two entries. Under "Childbed" he wrote that dreaming of giving birth "denotes fortunate circumstances and safe delivery of a handsome child". Under "Birth" he narrowed it by who was dreaming: for a married woman, "great joy and a handsome legacy is foretold", while for a single woman Miller read the same dream as loss of virtue and abandonment by her lover. The Victorian dictionaries often read one image two ways like this, by marriage and respectability, and that half of Miller's reading says more about his century than about anyone's dream.
The Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) read a birth as good for a poor man, and a woman dreaming that "she is about to have a child" as "a rich legacy or other good fortune". Much earlier, Artemidorus, the second-century Greek interpreter, insisted that giving birth did not mean the same as being pregnant. Pregnancy was a thing still hidden; birth, he said, brought hidden things to light, as the hidden child comes out. For the poor and for debtors he read it as release from their troubles.
The fullest set of readings comes from Japan. The 1908 Yume handan jikkensho (『夢判斷實驗書』) by Karasawa Shōkaku has a short section headed "childbirth" on koma 51 of the National Diet Library scan, printed page 74. It reads a boy, a girl, twins, another person's child, a wife's child and the dreamer's own rebirth, one line each. The 1906 Yume handan (『夢判斷』), a Japanese translation of the Chinese Menglin xuanjie, repeats several of those lines on its page 288 and adds conditions of its own. And the Chinese Zhougong dream book (1880 print) gives the whole subject one seven-character line: a newborn boy or girl, it says, is great good fortune.
The books do not agree, and that is the interesting part. Where Miller and Zhou Gong saw fortune in the birth itself, the Meiji books saw it in what came after, in holding the child, and read the moment of birth with surprising suspicion. What follows sets the readings out scene by scene, then turns to the psychology.
Who gave birth
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history; no dream is a forecast.
What does it mean to dream that you are giving birth?
The contractions, the push, then the child on your chest. This is the dream as most people have it, and the one the books read most kindly. Miller's 1901 dictionary saw fortunate circumstances and a safe delivery in it. The 1908 Japanese book did not read the moment of birth itself so warmly, but it read the next moment, holding the newborn child, as the best line in its section: 「生れたる子を抱くとみれば立身出世の兆」, a sign of rising in the world. It also read a dreamer becoming like a baby and being born from someone's womb as winning people's trust and esteem. Psychologists hear completion in this dream: something carried for a long time is finally out in the world, and it is yours.
What does it mean to dream of someone else giving birth?
A sister in labour, a friend with a newborn, a stranger in a hospital corridor. The 1908 Japanese book read another person giving birth to a son as a sign that the dreamer would have a child of their own, and another person giving birth to a daughter as gaining property. A wife giving birth it read as descendants flourishing. The 1906 Yume handan has the same three readings, then adds a fourth that runs the other way: seeing one's own father or mother give birth, it said, meant the family business would decline. Psychologists usually read another person's birth as watching a change from the outside: someone close is starting something new, and the dream asks what that change means for you.
The baby and the labour
What does it mean to dream of giving birth to a boy?
The 1908 Japanese book is blunt here: 「男子生るとみれば疾に罹るの兆」, it says, reading the birth of a boy as falling ill. The 1906 Yume handan gives the same reading under its entry for bearing and raising a child. Miller has no line for the sex of the child, and the Zhougong dream book counts a newborn boy, like a newborn girl, as great good fortune. Psychologists read the child's sex less literally than the old books did. A boy in a birth dream often carries whatever the dreamer associates with sons or with masculinity, and that varies from person to person.
What does it mean to dream of giving birth to a girl?
In the same line as the boy, the 1908 Japanese book read the birth of a girl as losing property, and the 1906 book agreed. Neither gives a reason for either half of the line. Seen together with its next entry, where another woman bearing a daughter means the dreamer gains property, the book seems to read the dreamer's own birth and someone else's as mirror images. Psychologists, again, start from what a daughter means to the dreamer: tenderness, continuity, a younger self.
What does it mean to dream of giving birth to twins?
Two cries instead of one. The 1908 Japanese book read giving birth to twins or triplets as 口舌, quarrels and harsh words, as if several children arriving at once meant several voices at odds. The 1906 Yume handan agreed for ordinary people, but said an official who dreamed of twins or triplets would rise greatly in rank. Miller, under "Twins", read seeing twins as "security in business, and faithful and loving contentment in the home"; sickly twins he read as disappointment. Psychologists tend to hear doubling: two projects arriving at once, or one change with two sides to it.
What does it mean to dream of a difficult labour?
Hours that will not end, a birth that stalls, the fear that something is wrong. None of the books cited on this page has an entry for a difficult labour in a dream. The psychological reading is the clearest one available: difficult dream births often mirror a hard transition in progress, something that is ready to arrive but costing more effort than expected. The dream tends to come in the last, hardest stretch of a change, not at its start.
What does a giving birth dream mean psychologically?
Psychologists read birth dreams as arrival after incubation. If pregnancy dreams are about potential still forming, birth dreams are about the moment it can no longer stay inside: a project finished enough to show, a decision that has to be spoken, a new version of the self that is already here. They come to dreamers of any sex and at any age, and they cluster around beginnings: a new job, a move, the end of a long piece of work.
The labour matters as much as the child. An easy birth and a calm newborn tend to accompany changes that feel ready; a long, frightening labour tends to accompany changes that are being forced through. And the newborn, once it is there, often becomes the subject of later dreams, the baby dreams of losing, forgetting or protecting something small and new. Those usually track the weight of responsibility, not any real failing.
If you are pregnant, birth dreams are among the most common dreams there are, and they are usually rehearsal, not prophecy: the mind running through an event it knows is coming. If dreams regularly leave you distressed, that's worth mentioning to someone you trust.
A question to sit with
What have you been carrying for a long time that is now ready, or nearly ready, to come into the world?
A dream book can tell you that Miller saw fortunate circumstances in a birth, and that a Meiji dream book read a baby boy as illness. It can't tell you why your birth dreams always come the week before a deadline, or why the child in them is never yours. That shows only when your dreams are recorded and kept together. If you're wondering whether old dream meanings hold any truth at all, we wrote an honest answer: do dreams predict the future? Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is a private dream journal made for keeping them together: it listens to your dream, paints it, and reads it through the old books, the psychologists and one question.