During pregnancy, the theme of food is very present, both because of the dietary rules pregnant women are supposed to follow, and because of the gastrointestinal disturbances that often accompany the first months.
Various anthropological studies carried out in different parts of the world describe very precise dietary rules that pregnant women must follow in order to give birth without difficulty or to bring a perfectly healthy child into the world. In our own society too, proper nutrition is aimed not only at the child's development but also at the mother's well-being. Gone are the days when pregnant women were urged to "eat for two", putting their health at risk (as well as their figure, which they rarely got back after giving birth) and also that of the newborn, by eating carelessly and in excess.
Since food is a theme very present during pregnancy, it is understandable that it often appears in the manifest content of certain dreams of women who are expecting.
Dreams in which food is not seen only as nourishment but above all represents or replaces the baby, as shown by the accounts of some pregnant women speaking on this subject: «I dreamed that on the ultrasound, instead of the baby, I saw a beautiful red apple… that I sat down at the table and was served a plate with food shaped like an embryo… that I went grocery shopping and put pears in my cart, but then realized they were tiny babies… that I took the bread out of the oven and found myself holding a baby…»
But is there a reason, at a deeper level, why this analogy between food and baby that appears in dreams shows up more often in pregnancy than at other times in life?
The confusion between food and baby occurs more often in this period because it is tied to the physiological and unconscious regression to a childlike state that pregnant women experience. This means that, expecting a baby, the woman becomes a child again, that is, she "softens" the barriers between the different layers of her psyche that had kept the deepest contents from emerging and reaching consciousness. At the unconscious level, the childlike way of thinking (which exists in the adult too, though repressed and thus unrecognizable) explains pregnancy as though it derived from oral fertilization, as also underlined by fairy tales in which becoming pregnant came about through the ingestion of certain foods. The confusion between food and baby thus goes back to infantile sexual theories, not only of fertilization but also of birth. The inside of the body, in fact, is imagined as an undifferentiated cavity, a tube with the mouth and anus as its two ends, where there is no distinction between the gastrointestinal and the urogenital systems, and from which food and babies come out like excrement. Pregnancy, then, is linked to ingestion, and birth to evacuation.
Dreaming about this subject thus brings the woman back to the period of early childhood (particularly between ages 3 and 5) when, as a little girl, she had asked herself how birth happens. Dreaming allows her to rework the experiences tied to that time, reactivated by the pregnancy: of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the explanations she was given on this subject, or experiences tied to the birth of a brother or sister, or to her relationship with emotionally important pregnant women in her life.