Dreaming about pregnancy
Pregnancy dreams are extremely common during actual pregnancy and are reported by people who are not and cannot be pregnant. The two populations need separating before anything useful can be said, and most sites do not separate them.
Also searched as: being pregnant, pregnancy dream, expecting
Two entirely different sets of dreamers report this, and running them together is the standard error.
During pregnancy, these dreams are near-universal, frequently anxious, and generally about the pregnancy itself: complications, being unprepared, something being wrong. Pregnancy is associated with increased dream recall and vividness in multiple studies, and anxious content is a normal part of that. It is not a premonition and it is not a comment on the pregnancy.
Outside pregnancy, the dream is reported by men, by people past childbearing age and by people with no intention of having children, which by itself rules out most of the literal readings. In this population dreamers connect it to something being developed, and that connection is intuitive rather than established.
Common associations
- Something growing that is not ready, which is what dreamers themselves reach for.
- Anticipation, and the specific discomfort of a fixed future date.
- The body changing, which during pregnancy is literal.
- Responsibility taken on, in the reports from people who are not pregnant.
Positive readings
Calm, healthy pregnancy dreams during a real pregnancy are reported and are worth getting down precisely because the anxious ones are more memorable and skew the picture.
Outside pregnancy, the dream is often reported warmly and alongside a project or a change the dreamer is invested in.
Difficult readings
Anxious pregnancy dreams during a real pregnancy are common, normal and cause disproportionate worry. The most useful thing this page can say is that they are expected rather than diagnostic.
Dreams of pregnancy after a loss are a distinct and painful category and belong with the grief material rather than here.
Psychological perspectives
Continuity dominates completely during actual pregnancy: the dreams are about the thing occupying the dreamer.
Outside it, the "something in development" reading is what dreamers report and is not established. It is intuitive, it is old, and it has never been tested, and this site will say all three rather than pick one.
Cultural and historical
Pregnancy dreams are treated as significant in a substantial number of cultures, sometimes with formal conventions about what particular dreams indicate, and the classical dream manuals treat them at length.
Those conventions are specific to their traditions and disagree with each other, which is the usual finding and worth stating each time.
What the sleep science says
Pregnancy is associated with increased dream recall, vividness and anxiety content in multiple studies. Anxious birth and pregnancy dreams during pregnancy are common and normal.
New parents commonly report distressing dreams about the infant, including forgetting or losing them. These are well documented and are not indicators of anything.
Nothing establishes what a pregnancy dream means for somebody who is not pregnant.
Your own context
- Are you, or could you be, pregnant? This is the first question and it changes everything below it.
- Whose pregnancy was it?
- Was the feeling anxiety, anticipation or something else?
- Is anything in your life currently in a long middle stage?
If this recurs
During pregnancy these dreams recur and stop afterwards, which is what the research would predict. Logging them anyway makes the postpartum comparison possible and that comparison is genuinely interesting.
Outside pregnancy, recurrence tends to track a long project rather than anything about children.
Emotions often reported
- anticipation
- anxiety
- joy
- fear
- love
- confusion
Specific pregnancy dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
What happened
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Am I pregnant, trying, or recently postpartum?
- Whose pregnancy was it?
- What in my life is currently unfinished and growing?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 2.Gender Differences in Dream Recall: A Meta-AnalysisPeer-reviewed research
Michael Schredl and Iris Reinhard (2008) · Journal of Sleep Research
Cited for: Dream-recall frequency as a measurable, individually stable trait, and the factors that move it.
- 3.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
- 4.The Interpretation of DreamsPsychology literature
Sigmund Freud (1900)
Cited for: The wish-fulfilment model and the manifest/latent distinction. Historically decisive, and largely unsupported by later empirical work, cited as the origin of an idea, never as evidence for it.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of pregnancy have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- PersonChildChildren in dreams are reported very differently depending on whether the dreamer has children. For parents they are usually literal and anxious; for others they more often carry vulnerability, potential or the dreamer at that age.
- EventBirthBirth dreams are extremely common during pregnancy and are usually anxious. Outside pregnancy they more often accompany beginnings: projects, changes, new phases.
- EmotionWonderAwe-filled dreams are rare, disproportionately remembered, and reported by people of every belief and none. They are one of the more interesting things dreaming does.
- SymbolKeyKeys almost never appear alone. They appear as a problem. Lost, wrong, too many, or belonging to a lock the dreamer cannot find. The dream is usually about access rather than about the key.
- SymbolMoneyMoney dreams are extremely common and track waking financial concern more reliably than they track anything symbolic. Finding it and losing it are reported about equally, and both usually arrive during periods when money is already on the dreamer's mind.
- SymbolMusicMusicians dream about music substantially more than non-musicians, which is one of the cleanest continuity findings in dream research. For everybody else, music in a dream is rare and worth a note.
If you have this one often
A dream that frightens you and keeps coming back is its own subject. The nightmares section covers what is known about why they recur, the one rewriting technique with real evidence behind it, and when a nightmare stops being a dream problem and becomes something a clinician should hear about.
Records that mention pregnancy
These pages link to pregnancy, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.