Umbilical cord in a dream: what does it mean?
The cord is reported at the moment of cutting, and dreamers frequently report being asked to do it.
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 built a good deal on separation from the mother and would treat the cutting as the plainest available image of it, which is either illuminating or too neat depending on your view of the method.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would attend to who cut it, since the dream nearly always specifies that, and would treat a dreamer who could not do it as reporting something worth sitting with rather than a failure.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Pregnancy raises the rate of dreams about birth and about infants, and dreams of the cord specifically are commonly reported in the third trimester. None of it is predictive of how a birth will go, and a midwife will have heard every version of the question.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.Mythological
Practices around cutting, tying and disposing of the cord are among the most elaborate and most locally variable customs recorded anywhere, and burial of it in a particular place is very widespread.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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
The metaphor has been used so heavily that the literal object now reads as a symbol, which is a problem for anyone writing an actual birth.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It is the last physical connection between two people who will spend the rest of their lives separate, which is about as much meaning as one object can carry.
Genre conventions
Birth writing has improved enormously in a generation, largely because more of it is now written by people who have given birth.
How to subvert it
Write it from the midwife, for whom it is the fourth today and still worth doing well.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a room in the ten minutes afterwards.
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.