What it usually means
Pregnancy dreams come to people of every age, including those with no plans for children, and to men. That alone suggests the dream is rarely about a literal baby. What it describes is a condition: something has begun, is growing out of sight, and will have to come out eventually.
The candidates are ordinary — a project, a change of direction, a relationship entering a new stage, a side of yourself you have started to take seriously. The dream chooses pregnancy because it combines three things few other images do: it happens inside, it takes time, and past a certain point it cannot be undone.
For anyone who is pregnant, the picture changes. Dreams in pregnancy tend to be more frequent and more vividly remembered, partly because sleep becomes lighter and more broken, so there are more awakenings straight out of a dream. Those dreams often deal quite literally with the birth, the baby and the body, and they need no translation.
What changes the meaning
Being pregnant and glad. Readiness. Something you are carrying feels wanted, even if you have not said so aloud.
Being pregnant and alarmed. The more common version. Something has started that you did not choose or do not feel ready for — responsibility arriving ahead of schedule.
Someone else being pregnant. The growth is happening near you rather than in you: a friend's new venture, a partner's change, a shift in a group you belong to.
A pregnancy that goes on far too long. Something ready to come out has not been allowed to. Common among people sitting on finished work.
Finding out suddenly. News to yourself. The dream announces a change that was already underway before you noticed it.
A man dreaming he is pregnant. Neither unusual nor strange. The same image of carrying something new, with the added surprise of being handed a role you had not pictured.
Losing the pregnancy. Painful to wake from and worth treating gently. It often accompanies a fear that a plan will not survive, rather than any prediction. For people with real experience of loss, it may simply be memory.
Giving birth. The arrival. Whether the birth was easy or hard, and whether you could see the child, tends to track how ready the thing feels to be shown.
Not knowing who the father is. Uncertainty about where something came from, or about who shares responsibility for it.
When it keeps coming back
Repeated pregnancy dreams usually follow a long incubation: a decision half-made for months, a piece of work nearly finished, a change that keeps being postponed. They often stop once the thing is started or dropped, which is useful information about which of the two you needed. A dream that ends in birth after weeks of pregnancies tends to arrive close to the moment of starting.
If the dreams recur while you are trying to conceive, or after a loss, they are carrying something very direct, and no general reading will tell you more than you already know. The kindest approach is to write them down and let them be what they are.
In Jungian terms
Jung treated the child as an image of the future personality — what is on its way to becoming, rather than what already is. Pregnancy is the stage before that. The new thing exists but is still inside: dependent, protected, and unseen by anyone else.
Jungian readers pay close attention to how the dreamer relates to the carrying. Resentment, pride, secrecy and fear each describe a different relationship with one's own development. The pregnancy can be welcome or not; either way it is a sign that something has taken root and is drawing on your resources to grow.
The plain form of the question is this. What have you started that is not visible yet, and are you feeding it or waiting for it to go away.