In a period of life when women are likely to be focused on their condition and on the baby to come, it might seem strange that animals appear so frequently in their dreams.
It is interesting to know, however, that the human embryo, in the first days of life, closely resembles, to the naked eye, an animal embryo: so the dream, produced by the unconscious (where similar means equal), represents this identification between the child, often called in everyday language a "cub", and the animal.
Telling of her animal dreams leads Lara to speak of her childhood interest in the subject and to recall some animals she has had and loved.
«I've never dreamed of so many dogs, cats, horses, elephants as in these last few months… At night it feels like I'm a child again, when I had a passion for animals, which I used to look at in the pages of books or in videos on TV… I loved stuffed animals too, especially the panda Yuyu that I've had since I was born and that I've kept for my children… As a little girl I thought I'd become a vet and go to China to save the pandas, which are becoming extinct… since I couldn't have a live panda, I made do with bringing home whatever animals I happened to find on the street: little birds, dogs or cats… once I saved a newborn kitten, abandoned by its mother, which I raised in my dolls' pram: I gave it a bottle, kept it warm under the sheets… I dressed it, combed it, treated it as if it were my baby, even if that probably wasn't quite what it wanted!»
As happens with many children, Lara too identifies with the animal, to which she attributes desires and feelings that in fact belong to her, and which also stirs maternal feelings in her, because its chances of survival depend on her.
Dreams of animals thus make it possible to fulfill the desires linked to the pregnant woman's double identification, since during pregnancy she experiences herself simultaneously as the mother of herself and as the embryo/fetus she carries within her (and as the one she once was in her own mother's womb).
These are both desires of love/symbiosis and desires of hate/destruction, expressed through a wide range of manifest content that plays out every shade of the theme of "the animal". A theme especially favored in pregnancy, both because in many cases the animal represents a substitute for children (especially for those who have none), and because it is able to arouse a wide range of feelings, from love and tenderness to hatred and violence.