Babies

The dream dictionaries answer before you have described the dream: a baby means a new beginning, a fresh start, the part of you that wants to be born. It is the sunniest entry in the book, and the laziest. It hands you a greeting card and closes the cover. But the baby in dreams is rarely so tidy. There is the radiant newborn and the baby you forgot you were carrying; the infant you cannot feed and the one found caged or abandoned; the child who speaks with impossible authority and the one you are terrified you will drop. The tradition does not read the baby as “newness.” It reads it as something arriving from elsewhere — a figure breaking in — and the only useful questions are what kind of infant this is, where it came from, and whether you can keep it alive.

Begin with the warning that the dream-baby is not the literal one. James Hillman, glossing Jung, insists that “lay prejudice is always inclined to identify the child motif with the concrete experience ‘child,’ as though the real child were the cause and precondition of the existence of the child motif,” when in fact the image “is emphatically not a copy of the empirical child” (Hillman, Mythic Figures, 2007). The baby is not your past self in miniature and not a forecast of pregnancy. It is what Jung and Kerényi called infans noster, “our child” — a figure that arrives as “an irruption of the unconscious,” sometimes radiant, sometimes, like the ghostly “Radiant Boy” said to appear on Roman ground, “of evil omen” (Jung and Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, 1949). The same image that means salvation can mean dread.

This is why Jung treats the dream-infant as the psyche’s symbol for the impossible third. Faced with a conflict consciousness cannot solve — tertium non datur, no third is given — he writes that the unconscious answers with a specific picture: “symbols of a reconciling and unitive nature do in fact turn up in dreams, the most frequent being the motif of the child-hero” (Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958). The baby is what is born when two things that could not be reconciled somehow are. It is “the Child as Beginning and End” — both what you came from and what you are moving toward (Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959).

The alchemists, whom Jung read as dreamers in chemical disguise, knew this child came out of death and not out of joy. Marie-Louise von Franz, following an ancient text, describes the body in the alembic “which was formerly a corpse, but lives, now comes out like a child out of the mother’s womb”; the blackness, the nigredo, is “likened to the state of death, when the corpse is destroyed in the tomb,” and only then “a child is born which is either the infant Mercurius or a divine child, or the philosopher’s stone” (von Franz, Creation Myths, 1995). The dream-baby, in this reading, is not the start of something easy. It is what survives a dissolution — born, precisely, because something else has died.

The Greeks ringed the newborn with the same danger. Jean-Pierre Vernant records that the infant, however welcome, was never simply set down on the world: laid on the ground he was “delivered into the hands of the chthonic powers,” so the exposed child was always cradled in “a chest, a basket, or a pot,” and the legitimate newborn was carried at a run around the household hearth before he could be named (Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983). The baby belonged at first to the underworld and had to be carried, deliberately, into the human world. And the divine infants were stranger still. Walter Burkert collects the iconography of Dionysus born twice — torn early from his mother and sewn into the thigh of Zeus, then carried in procession as the child-god on wheels (Burkert, Greek Religion, 1977). The Homeric hymn-poets sang the newborn Apollo who, the moment he tasted “that divine heavenly food,” could “no longer then be held by golden cords nor confined with bands, but all their ends were undone” (Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, c. 700 BCE). The mythic baby is the one who will not stay swaddled.

And then the dream that does not glow at all. Donald Kalsched reports a patient’s first dream in analysis: a pet store, cages of puppies, and then “there’s a baby in one of the cages. This is horrifying. The baby has huge brown eyes … It looks so sad. Then it curls into the fetal position” (Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul, 2013). The dreamer wept on waking. Here the infant is not a future to be welcomed but a past that was caged — “a younger and precious part of herself … forced into captivity,” a “soul-carrier” for the aliveness that early trauma had sealed away. The baby behind bars is the self that was not allowed to grow, asking, finally, to be let out.

So the question the dream asks is not whether good things are coming. It is what has arrived — and what it is asking of you. Hillman, reading the same figure across all his tandems, calls the child “an avatar of the Self’s spiritual aspect,” our “affinity to beauty,” our nature “as messenger of the divine” (Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma, 1996, citing Hillman). A messenger requires a response. The dream-baby is vulnerable in exactly the way a message is vulnerable: it can be fed or forgotten, carried in or left on the ground, kept caged or let out. It came from somewhere deep, out of a death or a hearth or a cage, and it cannot keep itself alive. The dream is not congratulating you on a new beginning. It is laying something newborn in your arms and waiting to see whether you will pick it up.