What Does It Mean if You Dream of Being Pregnant?
Pregnancy dreams can happen to people of all genders, and they can involve surprising twists that challenge your ideas of what pregnancy is. Though the imagery of a dream about being pregnant can be shocking, such dreams can be a symbolic working out of all sorts of issues beyond actual pregnancy.
Pregnancy Dream Summary
Pregnancy Symbolism
Pregnancy is a creative process that requires nurturing, patience and, at times, secrecy. It is also something that humans share with many animals, so it is often involved in conflicts between humans’ primal side and humans’ attempts to build increasingly complex civilizations.
Depending on the situation, pregnancy can represent a burden, or it can represent an opportunity for renewal. It is the routine means by which human life has continued for many generations, but it can also be miraculous.
Common Pregnancy Dreams
Here are a few variations on the theme of pregnancy that could affect the meaning of your pregnancy dream.
- Dream of a virgin being pregnant
- Dream of a man being pregnant
- Dream of an infertile person being pregnant
- Dream of an unwanted pregnancy
- Dream that your spouse or partner is pregnant
- Dream of an animal being pregnant
What Does Pregnancy Symbolize?
Creativity
It is weird to think about it this way, but pregnancy is the process by which humans create other humans. Pregnancy dreams can therefore symbolize whatever you are trying to create in your life.
If you are writing a novel or symphony, or even working on a big business presentation, a pregnancy dream could symbolize how you feel about your progress toward your goal.
If you are actually trying to become pregnant in your waking life, the details of this dream could give clues as to how the process is going for you. Dreams can provide useful information, but they can also reflect anxiety, so always refer any medical concerns that you have about a pregnancy to your doctor or other healthcare professional.
Nurturing
A common saying during pregnancy, going along with strange food cravings, is “I’m eating for two,” acknowledging the need for extra calories to nourish the growing fetus. If there are any holes in your approach to taking care of yourself, they become more apparent under the demands of a pregnancy.
A dream of being pregnant could therefore symbolize issues relating to how you nurture or are nurtured by others. You may need to take better care of yourself in order to take care of others who depend on you.
Life
Pregnancy is part of the process of how life begins. This component of pregnancy is often emphasized in political controversy regarding abortion.
A pregnancy dream may therefore bring up your views on when life begins and how to balance all of the competing interests involved. It may also symbolize struggling with a relationship unrelated to pregnancy where you feel that another person is overly dependent on you, but you don’t know how to change the relationship without destroying the other person.
A pregnancy dream after you have been through a difficult situation can symbolize rebirth and being able to rebuild your life.
Patience
People nowadays are used to instant gratification, to getting exactly whatever they want immediately at the touch of a button on their phone or computer. With pregnancy, it doesn’t really work that way – usually you have to wait about nine months before the child is born, and you usually can’t control what the child’s characteristics will be.
Your dream of pregnancy could therefore symbolize that some matter in your life is proceeding on its own proper timetable, even if things are not moving as quickly as you or others involved would like them to be moving.
Secrecy
In the early months of pregnancy, the person who is pregnant typically is aware of the pregnancy, while others around them are not. Figuring out who and how and when to tell about the pregnancy can therefore be a big drama.
Your dream of pregnancy could therefore symbolize that you are holding on to some secret information and struggling to find the right circumstances for sharing that information with others.
Gender Issues
Pregnancy most commonly happens to women, though in recent years recognition has grown that some transgender and nonbinary people become pregnant too.
For a woman, dreaming of pregnancy can therefore bring up situations where you feel different from men. Perhaps you are worried that getting pregnant will impact your career.
What Does It Mean if You Dream About Cows? notes that cow symbolism brings up a lot of themes around motherhood. Cows tend to be either idealized or denigrated in symbolism, depending on the culture, and people similarly have trouble assessing the maternal side of human women in an evenhanded way.
Numbers
A human pregnancy is typically around nine months long. If that figure of nine months is emphasized in your dream, you might look at the symbolism of the number nine in What Does It Mean if You Dream About Numbers?
If the pregnancy in your dream is some non-standard number of months long, or if the dream notes how many months along the pregnancy is, look up the symbolism of that number. Also, think about whether that interval of time is relevant to any events that you know are coming in your own life – for instance, if you dream you are due to give birth in four months, and you know in waking life that you have to defend your senior thesis to graduate from college in four months, there is probably a connection.
Pregnancy Dream Interpretations
Dream of a virgin being pregnant
A pregnant virgin is prominent in the story of Christianity: as described in the Bible, the Virgin Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. She then gave birth to Jesus Christ, and Christians commemorate this birth with the celebration of Christmas.
If you grew up in the Christian tradition, dreaming of a pregnant virgin may bring up your memory of this story. You may, like Mary, feel called by God or by circumstances to perform some heroic act, potentially at personal cost to yourself.
More broadly, dreaming of a virgin being pregnant could symbolize feeling like you have all the resources you need to make something happen within you already, and you don’t need another person to help you. This could be associated with feelings of confidence or with feelings of loneliness.
Dream of a man being pregnant
For most of human history, it was taken for granted that it was impossible for a man to be pregnant. With recent advances in transgender rights, however, it is now possible for transgender men to become pregnant, as shown on the TLC TV show My Pregnant Husband.
If you are a transgender man who can become pregnant, dreaming of yourself being pregnant does not have the connotation of impossibility that it does for other men. It can, however, be more complex than a woman who can become pregnant dreaming of becoming pregnant, as you may wrestle with how to interpret pregnancy through the lens of your masculine identity.
If you are a man who cannot become pregnant, dreaming of yourself being pregnant can bring up concerns about your masculinity too. In this context, a pregnancy dream could also refer to something thought to be impossible becoming possible.
Everyone, however, has some capacity to access the whole range of human experience, though in some cases this capacity may be more symbolic than physical. The creative process includes both the spark of an idea, analogous to the sperm fertilizing the egg, and doing the work necessary to make the idea manifest in the physical world, analogous to the fertilized egg gestating in the womb.
If you are a man dreaming of being pregnant, you may simply be involved in the gestation phase of some creative project, having to steadily work in a nurturing and caring way. Even the most macho guy ever might have that approach to lovingly tuning up his car.
If you are a woman dreaming of a pregnant man, you may feel that you are or soon will be getting needed support from others in your life, especially if you felt leading up to this that everything was all on you.
Dream of an infertile person being pregnant
Infertility happens for many reasons. Some have to do with medical conditions, but most people who start out with the potential to become pregnant generally lose their fertility as they age through a process called menopause.
In the Bible story of Abraham and Sarah, Sarah gave birth to their son Isaac when she was already 90 years old, long after menopause, thanks to God’s intervention. If you are familiar with this story from having a Jewish or Christian background, dreaming of an infertile person being pregnant could mean that you may similarly be looking for a miracle – and you might get one.
More broadly, this dream might represent feelings of renewal and new potential, especially in ways that you thought were no longer possible. If you are an older adult, this dream might also represent becoming a grandparent or beginning some other new relationship of caring for a dependent, like with a pet.
Dream of an unwanted pregnancy
If you dream that you are pregnant and don’t want to be, you might double-check that whatever method of birth control you are using is in good working order. Sometimes dreams can relay information from your physical body.
If nothing is amiss physically, the dream could symbolize that you feel that others are dumping burdens on you in such a way that you can’t get away from it, and you will look like the bad guy if you make any effort to get away from it.
This dream also may symbolize being weighed down by an uncomfortable secret, where the problem grows bigger and bigger the longer it hides. At some point it’s going to have to come out, right?
Dream that your spouse or partner is pregnant
If you dream that your spouse or partner is pregnant, you may need to pay attention to your role in supporting them. Even if your spouse or partner is not really pregnant in waking life, they may need your help in some other way.
Pregnancy is typically a process that both members of a couple participate in starting, though only one then carries the baby for nine months. Dreaming of your spouse or partner being pregnant may therefore symbolize a situation where the hard part of something important to both of you falls disproportionately on one of you.
Such a situation could involve concerns related to money or your residence just as easily as it could involve a real pregnancy. As in the case of a pregnancy, not all of these situations can be made strictly fair, but sometimes they can be made less lonely.
Dream of an animal being pregnant
The basic structure of human pregnancy is similar to that of other mammals, though gestation periods vary, according to Ovia Health. It is hard for humans to keep in mind that, as advanced as we are in some ways, we still have a lot in common with animals.
To dream of an animal being pregnant therefore symbolizes the flow of life moving along without resistance, though it may seem chaotic and out of control by human standards.
If you dream of a specific animal being pregnant, look through the articles in the Animals section of this website to find the symbolism of that animal. You may find the qualities associated with that animal increasing in your life.
Conclusion
Some aspects of pregnancy have been the same throughout human history, while others have changed in recent years. Your pregnancy dream may incorporate both ancient and current features.
Whether or not your pregnancy dream’s symbolic meaning for your life has anything to do with giving birth to an actual baby, the powerful imagery undoubtedly grabbed your attention.