Miscarriage

The dream dictionaries reach for the obvious wound and stop there: you fear loss, you fear failure, something you wanted is slipping away. It hands the grief back to you in the same shape it arrived and calls that an interpretation. But a miscarriage in a dream is not one image. There is the pregnancy that ends in blood and the one that simply goes quiet; the loss you suffer and the loss someone takes from you; the child mourned and the child you did not know you were carrying. The tradition does not read the dream as a verdict on your fertility or your fear. It reads it as a question about gestation — what was forming in you, why it could not be born, and whether its death is the end of the matter or the strange beginning of something else.

Start with what is actually being lost. Marie-Louise von Franz, reading a fairy tale in which a mother destroys her son’s child, names the miscarriage as psychic before it is anything else: “his mother kills his child, his creative fantasy. As a result he can no longer bring his creative impulses into concrete reality” (von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997). The thing aborted is a content — an impulse that needed to come down into form and was killed before it could. Elsewhere she describes the opposite labor, the man “possessed by a pregnant woman” who must “disentangle himself from his pregnant anima in the right way and proceed toward creation,” and warns of the other road, “to repress the problem and do nothing,” in which one stays “identical with the pregnant state” and grows “absolutely miserable and getting worse and worse” (von Franz, Creation Myths, 1995). The dreamed miscarriage can be that second road made visible: the new thing that was never carried out into the daylight world.

James Hillman insists this death is built into beginnings, not a failure added to them. The new content, he writes, “must be weak on earth, because it is not at home on earth”; there is “difficulty at the beginning; the child is in danger, easily gives up,” and so “the new dies easily because it is not born in the Diesseits” — not born into the here-and-now (Hillman, A Blue Fire, 1989). Every nascent thing arrives already endangered. The miscarriage dream may simply be telling the truth about how fragile the not-yet-incarnate always is, how little it takes for a vision to die before it can take a body.

The Greeks read loss into the very anatomy of the dream. Jean-Pierre Vernant recovers the ancient dreambook of Artemidorus on the navel, the body’s first knot to the mother who carried us: “The omphalos symbolizes the parents for as long as they live, or the mother country in which each was born… To dream of a mishap to the navel means one will be deprived of one’s parents or country” (Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983). The umbilical site is where belonging is made and where its severance is dreamed. A miscarriage works that cord in reverse — the link to origin cut not behind us but ahead of us, in the one who was to come.

And here the tradition turns, because the deepest reading of the lost child is not extinction but descent. Walter Burkert tells the oldest version through Demeter’s stolen daughter: Kore must go down into the earth, and the myth was understood as “transparent nature allegory: Kore is the corn which must descend into the earth so that from seeming death new fruit may germinate” (Burkert, Greek Religion, 1977). The child does not vanish; she is taken under, and the taking-under is the condition of return. Margaret Alexiou shows that the grief itself was made sacramental: “the grief of Demeter for Persephone, of mother for child, was a dominant element of the Eleusinian mysteries,” a lament that became “a means of salvation and deliverance” (Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974). The mourning was not the failure of the rite. It was the rite.

The alchemists gave this descent its harshest name and its strangest promise. Edward Edinger reads the blackening, the mortificatio, as the death without which nothing is born: out of the corruptible seed’s death grows “the incorruptible body,” for “death is the conception of the Philosophers’ Stone” (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985). In that grammar the lost seed is not waste. The dissolution is the conception. What dies as one body is the precondition of the body that cannot die.

So the question the dream asks is not whether you fear loss — you do, and the dream knows it. It is what was gestating, and where it has gone. The dictionary wants the dreamed miscarriage to mean only an ending, a thing subtracted. The longer tradition will not let it stay that simple. The child may be a creative content killed before it reached form, and then the dream is asking what in you, or around you, refuses to let the new thing be carried out into life. Or the child may be Kore, taken under not to be destroyed but to germinate, and then the blood in the dream is the mortificatio, the death that is also a conception. Either way the image holds its hand open between grief and gestation. The dream is not closing the account. It is asking whether you can stay with the descent long enough to find out what the loss was carrying.