Dreaming Of Not Feeding A Baby

Having a baby is more magical time than ever. It is a time where you are cultivating a family and is a true life changing memorable experience in your life. Developing new approaches to how you manage your life is all part of being a new parent.

All is not always ideal in our dreams. In my experience, I have remembered that I forgot to feed my baby and have been alarmed when I found out, or I remember dreaming that I could not find my baby which left panic all day. Here I will cover what "forgetting to feed your baby" means if you are a mother or father or you do not have children and the nightmare of not feeding your baby enters your dreams. As a mother or father, you are taking on a new role of teacher and protector. Caring for your baby and having this new life is a “life-changing” experience comes with excitement but also anxieties and worries of reaching the standards that you set yourself. In our subconscious mind at night we sometimes play out our fears. This can sometimes translate into our dreams. It is not uncommon to dream night after night of not feeding your baby.

I am here to tell you that this is a perfectly normal dream and can just represent changes you are undertaking in life. As such, I am going to address this dream from a holistic perspective and I can tell you now it boils down to your own fears or changes in your life. Food is one of the most powerful, spiritual tools that we encounter in life and enables our children’s bodies to function optimally. The "feeding children in dreams" is a function that serves as a contact between mother and child, mind to mind, mother to baby and provides us with the parental accomplishment of caring for another. Now, the heart of the mystery of this dream interpretation - lies in the details.

If you forget to feed your baby in a dream but remember later in the dream is known in psychology as "restructuring our schemata" through insight. When you become a parent you change, and consequently, your inner schemata also change. This means that as a new parent you will bring associations of the inner parent. In psychology, there are three areas of our own personalities. This is our inner child, inner adult and finally inner parent. When having a child we are going through a process of switching positions and this can result in changes in our dream state - such as forgetting to feed the baby, or forgetting to change a nappy. It may be that you are coming to a realization that you are able to nurture another person and this dream has occurred because you have moved from one schema to another.

What does it mean to forget to feed a baby when you don’t have a child in real life?

There was an interesting account in a book called “Working with dreams in psychotherapy by Clara E Hill” she detailed a dream of women that had a number of dreams of not being able to care for a baby, such as not being able to feed the baby or look after the child. But, interestingly this woman did not have a child in real life. It was thought that this was a cognitive shift in the way that her inner schemata were restructuring. In therapy, this particular woman was discussing if she should have a baby so from a psychotherapy perspective, it could be that she was already shifting her thinking and unconscious processes in the dream state.

What does a neglected baby mean in a dream?

The first thing that I will say is that this is a regular and normal dream of a parent you will see when I go deeper into the meaning that it is more focused on your own characteristics. Principally, the baby itself can indicate your own inner feelings or even our inner child in dreams. The baby is associated with vulnerability, responsibility, joy, and curiosity. The dream of neglecting your own child can be rather distressing and can fundamentally cause anxieties to surface.

If the baby is crying in your dream this indicates that YOUR needs are not being met. There may be an issue in your waking life that is distressing you at the moment and the baby itself is an archetype. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss dream psychologist from the 1930s believed that babies are parts of our completion in life, that they are seeds we plant in order to grow and develop. When a baby appears in a dream it can indicate that we are in tune with our “divine child” In Jungian psychology the archetypes are divided into many categories, and this dream falls into the "divine child" which equals own inner child.

This dream can be connected to your own deep spiritual wants and needs. Many psychologists have reported that baby dreams can be a secret message that you are not being responsible in life. Jung had some interesting things to say about the divine child in dreams, one being that the child appears in our subconscious mind when we have a new opportunity in life and that we need to focus on surviving and growing.

On the tarot deck, the divine child is shown on the sun card and is a symbol of rebirth, the wholeness of the self and the archetypal journey in life. Spiritually this dream can imply sunshine after a period of difficulty. What I am trying to say is that this dream has nothing to do with the neglected baby but more about how you meet your own needs and the fact that opportunities will soon be yours. The archetype known as the divine child is within our own personality and enters our dream state in certain situations. Jung did not write that much on the archetype, apart from one paper called the “child archetype” which detailed the relationship with the great mother that we have in life. Jung, states that the divine child represents our hopes, fears, potential and being a hero.

What do ancient dream books state on forgetting to feed your baby?

I'm Flo and I have been studying dreams for twenty years. Much of my research has been collated from ancient dream books that are rare and some only found in private subscription libraries in England. Sometimes the meaning of these books and papers is ambiguous and can be controversial. I feel that we do need to maintain the ancient meanings, document them somewhere even from a historical purpose.

Are they true spiritual accounts of a dream? Well, that is up to you to decide. So let's move onto the more ancient "old fashioned" dream meaning. If you are a woman and you dream that you have forgotten to feed your baby, it is a warning that you are contemplating some enterprise which if carried out will result in shame and misfortune. If you are feeding the baby in your dream after you have forgotten, it means that either a friend or a lover will help you find happy times in the future. This dream also indicates you can gain some finances in the future to prevent any losses of financial ruin.

This dream also demonstrates that you have been given a responsibility, the baby itself is "symbolic" and represents something to cherish and nurture, but you are failing to provide this with what it needs to grow. This does not necessarily mean a real baby as already pointed out. It could be a new employment, a venture, or some type of affiliation. The spirits have given you this dream to change your behavior in relation to a new event in your life. To feed a baby that is not your own indicates that you will have good prosperity over the next year. The dream about not feeding your baby can be a bad omen, although the picture of a breastfeeding mother in everyday life has almost a sacred significance. It is said that one see a woman breastfeeding after she forgot to feed the baby in a dream usually means trouble or locking away feelings.

Sources:The dream age, 1895, London press, pagan papers (Author Unknown.) The Universal Dream Dictionary, Pages 103, 102 and 109. (1795) Linn Denise, A pocketful of dreams, Piakus, 1993. Mahoney, Maria, the meaning in dreams and dreaming, Citadel press, 1987 and JH Green, Golden age of baby dreams, unpublished paper. Essays and stories (1894), On culture pattern dreams, archetypal dreams that have assumed central importance in particular culture, Lincoln, the dream 22 and Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational 102-134.