What does it mean to dream about birth?
Birth pictures new beginnings and creativity, the start of a project, phase, or self.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
Freud connected images of birth and emerging from water to the fact of being born and to wishes about beginnings. The dream can rework the dreamer's relation to origin, dependence, and the start of life.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung birth images the emergence of something new in the psyche, a fresh potential, a new self, or the start of a creative phase. It is the dawn-end of the same process whose other face is symbolic death.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Cognitively birth pictures new beginnings, creativity, and the start of a project or phase. It tends to surface around real change and growth, and the feeling around it, joy or fear, tracks how the dreamer meets the new thing emerging.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Miraculous and cosmic births fill world myth: the birth of the world from chaos or the cosmic egg, gods born in strange ways, the hero whose birth is marked by signs. Birth images the creative act by which something comes into being.
Bulfinch; Frazer.