An abortion dream means you abandoned a creative process before it finished. Your conscious mind planted a seed thought in your subconscious mind, a new quality started growing in you, and you stopped feeding it before it was ready to be born. It's a dream about an idea, not about a pregnancy or your body, and it's asking you to look at what you walked away from.

Men have this dream too, not only women. That's the first clue that it isn't about the body at all.

So you woke up shaken, you went looking, and most of what you found told you this dream is guilt, or fear of a pregnancy. Think about that for a second. Your mind didn't speak to you in a sentence. It spoke to you in a picture. And a picture has to be read as a picture, not taken at face value.

And if you've lived this in your waking life, hear me plainly. This dream isn't a verdict on you, and it isn't passing judgement on any choice you've made. It's telling you about something that started growing in your mind recently. That's the whole subject of the dream.

What Does Abortion Really Mean in the Universal Language of the Mind?

In the Universal Language of the Mind, as Tarak Uday teaches it, every image is read by its form and its function. The form here is a gestation. The function of the image is that the gestation stops before the birth. Now turn that inward, because the dream is about your mind and nothing else. Something was growing inside you, and it stopped before it arrived.

The Dream Symbol Dictionary gives the meaning in one line: "Abandonment of the creative process." To see why, you have to see the family this symbol belongs to. It's the third picture in a set of three.

Look, here's what's actually happening at the level of mind. Your conscious mind is the aggressive half. Your subconscious mind is the receptive half. You create anything, a new habit, a new way of carrying yourself, a new you, the same way a new person is created. The conscious mind plants a seed thought, the subconscious mind receives it, and the thought gestates there, gaining form and density, until it's pushed out into your physical life. So pregnancy in a dream is, in the dictionary's words, "gestating the idea of a new way of being." A baby in a dream is the "birth of a new inner quality." And an abortion is the same gestation with the ending changed. The seed was planted. The growing began. Then you quit feeding it.

The dictionary's entry for Pregnancy says "This is a creative process that requires patience, nourishment, and protection." An abortion dream shows you the moment one of those three ran out. It's what the Abortion entry describes as "a creative idea that could not reach fruition."

✦ Key Insight

Pregnancy in a dream is a new way of being gestating in you. A baby is that new quality being born. An abortion is the gestation stopped. Same process, three pictures, and the dream is showing you which one you're living.

What Are the Most Common Abortion Dream Scenarios — and What Do They Mean?

What Does It Mean When You Dream About Having an Abortion Yourself?

When you're the one having the abortion, you're the one who stopped. There's no middleman in this dream. You began growing a new quality in yourself, more patient, more disciplined, more outspoken, more responsible, and you withdrew your attention from it before it had the strength to stand on its own.

So don't go hunting through your past. Look at what you started wanting to become lately, and then look at the day you quit thinking about it. That's what the dream is pointing at.

What Does It Mean When You Dream About Someone Else Having an Abortion?

Every person in your dream is an aspect of you. So when someone else has the abortion, an aspect of you abandoned what it was gestating, and who she is tells you which aspect. A friend or a family member is a side of yourself you know well, the kind of thing you'd say if somebody asked you to describe your personality. A stranger is a side of yourself you're less familiar with.

That second one matters. If it's a stranger, the abandoning happened in a part of you that you haven't been watching, and you gave something up without realizing it. With a stranger you read how she acts and your sense of what kind of person she is. That's the dream bringing it up where you can see it.

What Does It Mean When You Dream About Being Forced Into an Abortion?

So this one gets misread more than any other. People wake up and start looking for who in their life is pressuring them. Stop right there. Every dream is about the dreamer. Nobody from out there walked into your dream. Whoever forces it is a part of you, and that part is overriding the part of you that wanted the new quality.

So read who it is. A man is an aspect of your conscious mind. A woman is an aspect of your subconscious mind. Someone you know well is a side of yourself you know well, so ask what quality you'd name first if you described that person, because that quality in you did the overriding. A stranger is a side of you that you know less well, so watch how they behave in the dream. Pushy. Cold. Hurried. Afraid. An authority figure, a doctor for instance, is an aspect of your superconscious mind. Then you name it. Only you can say which part of you that is.

What Does It Mean When You Dream About Preventing an Abortion?

You're protecting the gestation. The Pregnancy entry gives two words of instruction for anything growing in you: "Protect it." In this dream you did. Some part of you was ready to let the new quality go, and you kept your attention on it instead. Notice who or what you stood up to in the dream, because that's the part of you that wanted to quit.

What Does It Mean When You Dream About Multiple Abortions?

More than one abortion in the same dream is the same abandonment, repeated. You start growing something new in yourself, you let it go, you start another, you let that go too. And if the dream itself keeps coming back night after night, that's a lesson you haven't received yet. The dream doesn't change until you do.

What Is Your Abortion Dream Trying to Tell You About Your Life?

Start with where it happened. You always want to pay attention to the place, because the place in a dream is your state of mind, the space you exist in inside your own mind. If the abortion happens in a hospital, the dictionary reads a hospital as a "healing state of mind," which means you were already at work changing unproductive thinking into productive thinking when you walked away from this new quality. If it happens at home, you were in your regular, everyday state of mind, the way you habitually think. So the abandoning wasn't a crisis. It was an ordinary day.

Then ask yourself the real questions. What new quality have I been trying to grow in myself? When did I stop giving it my attention? Did I stop because it isn't who I am, or because it asked more of me than I wanted to give?

Tarak Uday takes this further in Structure of the Mind, his map of the three divisions of mind and the powers of attention, memory and imagination.

Now here's what the dream doesn't do. It doesn't tell you that you were right to stop, and it doesn't tell you that you were wrong. It hands you no verdict at all. The Dream Symbol Dictionary says the dream urges you to scrutinize the aspirations you've been nurturing and "to ascertain whether they align with your true self." It calls the dream "a call to clarity." Answering that is your work, awake. Only the dreamer can interpret the dream.

Why Does the Universal Language of the Mind Get This Right When Other Systems Don't?

Popular readings take this dream literally. They treat it as guilt, or as fear about a pregnancy, and they stop there. That reading has nothing to say to the man who had this dream, or to the woman who has never been pregnant. It misses that a dream is spoken in a language of images, and that every person, place and thing in it is an aspect of the one dreaming.

The Universal Language of the Mind works because it reads the image by what it does. The symbol means the same thing for every dreamer, whatever their background or history. What changes from one dreamer to the next is the quality that was being grown.

The Verdict

An abortion dream is an abandoned creative process: a new quality you began to gestate and stopped feeding. The symbol is universal. Which quality it was, and which part of you let it go, is yours to name.

How Should You Respond to an Abortion Dream?

So write the dream down while it's fresh. The place, the people, who did what. Then name the quality you started growing and stopped feeding. Say it in one plain sentence.

Next, do what the dictionary's entry asks: "define precisely who you want to evolve into." Not roughly. Precisely. A seed thought with no clear picture has nothing to grow into, and that's how most of these gestations end. If you want the pieces of your dream laid out one image at a time, the dream symbol library is where to look them up.

Then act. The Dream Symbol Dictionary says to "employ relentless and unceasing action towards manifesting and nurturing your chosen path of evolution." So do one thing toward that quality today. One. A new quality needs your constant attention until it can get around on its own, the same as a baby does.

You can log the dream and decode it in CHITTA, free to start. This dream isn't a condemnation. It's your subconscious mind showing you that something in you began, and that you can still commit to who you're becoming.