(2) Just possibly it is your own birth you are dreaming about.
If so, it might mean, especially if you are depressed, that you are asking why you were bom. But don’t miss the opportunity to relive your dream and note the emotions - positive or negative - associated with the birth. By ‘reliving your dream’ I mean closing your eyes and taking yourself all the way through the dream again.
‘... the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety and therefore source and model of the affect of anxiety (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams). This idea of birth as the prototype of all anxiety, which all later feelings of anguish revive and reinforce, was developed by Otto Rank (Trauma of Birth), who singled out the birth trauma as the decisive psychological event and the ultimate origin of all neuroses. So, it may be worth asking yourself if the birth image in your dream could possibly be associated with an anxiety, either conscious or repressed. For example, it might be that such an anxiety-associated birth image is telling you to sort out some unfinished business with your mother - by which I mean what your mother symbolized for you as a child or young adolescent, as well as your real relationship with your mother as she actually is or was. (Even when dead your mother may live on in your psyche, perhaps preventing you from being your own person. In such cases some people find it helpful to ask their unconscious to let them meet their deceased mother in dreams, where they can engage in dialogue with her.)
(3) For Jung, birth, life, death and rebirth all function as symbols of aspects of what he calls the ‘individuation’ process, which is the development of the human psyche to full maturation, wholeness and harmony. In Jungian terms, therefore, birth may symbolize the beginning - actual or potential - of a new phase in your personal development.
If you feel some such intimation of a possible new phase in your life (inner or outer - though for Jung the stress is on the inner), you would be well advised to work seriously and purposefully towards its realization, even if this means giving up something: the death of something - an old negative attitude, old anxieties or guilt-feelings, for example - is nearly always a precondition of new life.
the unconscious and rise again renewed or transformed. Only thus can one grow inwardly, in wisdom and strength and wholeness (see also Sun).
Understood in this way, the birth image may still have connections with mother or mother image (as in (2) above): the ocean commonly symbolizes mother, or simply the feminine.
If you are male, the feminine symbolism may refer to either your mother or your anima, the feminine side of vour personality (for anima, see Brother / Sister, section (4)).
(5) Giving birth in a dream may symbolize the (sometimes painful) process of bringing something new into your life, fashioning a new lifestyle for yourself, achieving a greater degree of maturity, or releasing and expressing in an appropriately creative way some psychic function hitherto repressed.
See also Baby, Child.