Why have I kept dreaming about baby in need for last two weeks?

By David McElroy · March 26, 2019

The dream always starts the same way. I’m alone in a forest much like this one and I suddenly realize there’s a baby girl somewhere here who needs my help.

The details can differ some nights, but the essentials are the same. It feels surreal. Somehow, I know there’s something symbolic about this. I know whose baby it is and I know she needs me to find her baby and care for the little girl temporarily.

I always find the baby quickly. Most of the time, she’s lying on the forest floor. One time, she was stretched out on a couch in the middle of the forest. (Why was there a couch in the woods?) But one thing is always the same.

As soon as I pick this baby up and cradle her close to my body, I feel instant love and fierce protectiveness. I know I would die to protect this precious child who I’ve never seen before.

Why did I start having this dream about two weeks ago? Why have I dreamed variations of it four or five or six times? (I’ve lost track.) What is it in our minds that creates these nightly dramas?

I grew up fascinated by dreams and I read all I could find about the subject. Sigmund Freud’s book, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” was on one of our book shelves. It was confusing reading for a young child, but I read it over and over to figure out what I could.

When I got older, I read more modern psychologists and brain scientists say that dreams are meaningless. It seems as though I read a lot of things which claimed dreams were nothing but random neurons firing and the stories we experience were simply our minds trying to make some sense out of the randomness.

I didn’t believe that then and I don’t believe it now.

I can’t explain what dreams mean. I can’t begin to say whether they’re messages from our unconscious mind or if we’re picking up something from the “collective unconscious” of humanity. Or something else entirely.

I’m willing to accept that many dreams are probably just random stories. I’ve experienced a lot of dreams that didn’t feel meaningful at all.

But every now and then, something in my dreams feels terribly important — in ways that I can’t explain to myself or to you. Something in my gut simply whispers, “Pay attention here. There’s something you need to understand in this.”

That’s the way I’ve been feeling about the dreams about the baby in the woods.

As far as I know, this baby isn’t my biological daughter. I think I know who the mother is. But I don’t know why the girl is in need. I don’t know where the mother is. I don’t know why she needs my help.

In every version of the dream I’ve had so far, I just held the baby closely for the entire time she was with me. I didn’t want to let her go. I was fierce about wanting to protect her. I felt a strong sense of responsibility to her mother, but I also felt such an overwhelming love for the baby that I would have sacrificed anything for her even if I hadn’t known her mother.

In every dream so far, the mother has taken over nurture of the baby again at some point. I’ve been unclear how that happens or how I give her back. I just know that I’m very happy when my responsibility is over — not because I don’t have to take care of the child anymore, but because it has felt like such an important honor to protect her.

Why would I dream all of that? Why would I create new versions, as if to emphasize that there’s something important to see here? I have no idea.

I believe Carl Jung was onto the right track when he decided there is a collective unconscious of some sort — some sort of spiritual or mental “field” of some kind that we all tap into at times. It sounds like nonsense to a modern scientific mind, but it somehow feels true to me.

What if there’s a child who needs my help? What if there’s a mother who needs me to help her daughter right now? What if I somehow know that in a dream state?

We are mostly mistaken about what things are important in our lives. We imagine that our obvious, conscious problems that need solutions are the things which are most deserving of our attention, but I suspect we’re wrong.

We have to solve our day-to-day problems, of course. But I suspect the things which are most important in our lives are those wisps of spiritual truth which are whispered in our unconscious minds or unconscious states, even if we can’t explain what’s going on.

Somewhere, there’s a little girl who needs my help. Maybe her mother needs me. I don’t know. I haven’t yet figured out enough about how to listen well enough to hear what I need to hear.

But I’m willing to hear. I’m willing to learn. I wish I’d been more willing to figure this out years ago.

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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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