Labour in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams about giving birth are common in pregnancy and are frequently about the process rather than the child: the reported detail is usually who is in the room.
How do the four traditions 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. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
Freud
Freud would attend to the attendants, since a dream that stages a birth has assembled a cast around it. He would also allow that a woman near term is dreaming about the thing itself, which needs no translation.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung labour can image a process that cannot be stopped once begun and that the dreamer must go through rather than manage. The recurring detail of being in the wrong place for it is worth reading as being about control.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
The plain reading comes first. These dreams are extremely common in the third trimester, they are well documented, and they are not predictive of how a birth will go. Vivid and anxious dreams during pregnancy are normal and are partly a function of disturbed sleep. Anyone frightened about an approaching birth should raise it with their midwife, who will have heard it many times.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.Mythological
Birth customs are among the most elaborate in any tradition and were largely concerned with danger, because until recently this was one of the likeliest ways for a woman to die. The ritual density reflects a real risk rather than a symbolic one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
In literature
Birth is written badly in fiction with striking consistency, usually compressed into a scene of shouting and a clean baby, and the honest accounts are nearly all memoir written by people who were there.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It supplies an event with a fixed outcome, an uncertain duration and no possibility of retreat, which is a rare structure. Its difficulty is that it is long, repetitive and physically specific in ways prose resists.
Genre conventions
Memoir is where the accurate writing is. Literary fiction increasingly uses the partner in the corridor. Genre fiction uses the emergency, which is dramatic and unrepresentative.
How to subvert it
Write a completely straightforward birth, at length, and let the drama be entirely in the two people involved.
Try this
Write four hundred words of early labour at home. Only what is done, in order, and the timing of it.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.