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“In my dreams I give birth, but never to babies,” began the caller to my dream talk back segment on radio last week. “I have birthed a vampire, a penguin, an insect … what does all this mean?”

No doubt the caller was pretty startled to look down and see a vampire flexing its wings and flashing its fangs in anticipation of its first feed at its mother’s breast. And no doubt she was relieved, when she greeted her fledgling penguin, that it hadn’t instinctively tried to peck its way into the world with its sharp beak designed for cracking eggshell. As for a tickling insect, well, I shudder.

The caller’s dreams reminded me of one of my own strange birth dreams. It was late 1980,  just before the birth of my daughter, Rowan. I dreamed I gave birth to a stick insect. I was a little disappointed, but mostly I was concerned about how I was going to look after this very fragile little being. I might squash it by mistake, or it might jump away and be forever lost, camouflaged on one of the hundreds of indoor plants that were de-rigour interior décor back in those days. What did my dream mean?

During my pregnancy I had been working as a high school teacher, teaching biology and general science. One of the introductory courses involved teaching the students to handle earthworms and stick insects, a course I managed to teach dozens of times without ever touching one of these creatures myself. Earthworms, to me, were every bit as slimy as the students believed them to be, even though, as I confidently explained, they were actually dry to the touch. “Pick them up,” I encouraged the students, “there, see? It’s not so bad, is it?” No-one ever noticed that earthworms and I kept a comfortable distance. While some students overcame their squiggly-wriggly earthworm phobias, I never did.

When it came to teaching the stick insect lesson I feared the fragility of the tiny creatures. How do you hold a stick insect firmly enough, yet gently enough, to protect it without squeezing the life from it? For me, stick insects represented the fragility of life, and a need for delicate balance between being too firm and too gentle. In one way my dream was a perfect pre-birth parenting lesson. In another way my dream revealed the natural anxieties of a new mother-to-be, hoping that my mothering instincts wouldn’t go the same way as my stick insect care instincts.

So far my dream interpretation seems simple. I was about to give birth and my dream was exploring my forthcoming parenthood. But while this was true, my dream had other levels of meaning too.

When you dream of giving birth, you are dreaming about what you are creating – giving birth to – in your life. I had chosen to become a mother, to leave my job and create a new life at home with a baby. How would I cope without a career? How would I survive without intelligent adult company for hours on end, day after day? I was unused to spending time by myself in those days. These were valid and fearful questions. My dream showed my concerns that the new lifestyle I was creating for myself might be fragile, that it – and I – might feel lost or crushed. That was the deeper meaning of my dream. I didn’t know enough about dreams at the time to understand this.

As it happened, neither of my children turned out to be stick insects. All my mothering instincts kicked in and we all survived to tell the tale. As my dream fore-shadowed, I was faced with some of my personal fragilities during the next few years when we lived in challenging circumstances in Nigeria and then in Ecuador before relocating to Australia. I found new strengths and Rowan and Euan grew into extraordinary, beautiful adults. If I had understood my dream back then, I would have gained those strengths earlier, with less outer world challenge. The power of dreams!

So what about the caller’s dreams of giving birth to vampires, penguins and insects? Vampires drain you of your lifeblood and energy, so perhaps she was creating something new in her life that was draining and exhausting. Baby penguins are born into icy conditions and need protection from the winds. Perhaps the dreamer was creating something new in her life under extreme conditions, something that would need supreme care and protection. It all depends on how the dreamer feels about a vampire, a penguin, or, in my case, a stick insect. Just as I put the label ‘fragile’ on my stick insect, the caller needs to put her personal labels on vampire and penguin to discover what energy she is creating – giving birth to – in her life.

There are lots of interesting similarities to contemplate between a vampire and a penguin. A vampire is a human or a bat, but not a bird, even though it has wings and can fly. A penguin is a bird and, even though it has wings, it cannot fly. When you look into someone else’s dream to offer an interpretation, you can get plenty of clues by looking for connections between the various symbols in a dream. But I digress …

Birth dreams are not just for women. In dreams all things are possible, and many men have told me about their dreams of giving birth, juicy and intriguing details included.

Alternatively your dreaming mind may give birth dreams a wide, ahem, ‘berth’, and choose to explore similar subjects through symbols of animals giving birth, trees coming into leaf or fruit, or other metaphors. I loved this recent one of mine:

I dreamed I was packing up a stage, handing boxes and things down to assistants in the auditorium. The last item was a really heavy cylindrical package, almost two metres long. Although it was heavy, I could lift it and carry it. I carried it to the edge of the stage and called one of the assistants over. I half dropped and half slipped the cylindrical package into his braced arms. He took the weight and I joked, “Congratulations sir. It’s a boy!” I woke myself up laughing at my dream joke. Yes, I had ‘made light’ of birthing something heavy. This dream refers to the way I often ‘make light’ of a big project once it is done and delivered. I write a book, labouring intensely for a few months, and as soon as it’s done the enormity of the task fades.

And that’s a wrap for this Dream Sight article, a few hours of labour done, a package delivered to your inbox, and, to finish, a joke to make light of the enormity of the task: Have you heard the one about the woman who dreamed she gave birth to a vampire? It sucks.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, February 2007. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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