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.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts