I will make a few pointers, share my associations and thoughts that pop up when I read this dream, not as interpretation but rather perhaps as some food for thought. I believe most dreams we have are very difficult to interpret, I mean really understand, because we dream about things we are unconscious of (in my point of view), so it is in the nature of the dreams that we don’t understand them at the point in time when we have them. But nonetheless I think it is of great value to keep and contemplate our dreams because eventually we grow an understanding of dreams we have had, and even have now. So these thoughts are for contemplation rather than interpretation.
Setting
The dream takes place in parallel universes. This is probably an image of what actually happens when we dream. Psychologically we are like layers inside: The feelings we had as children, the experiences we had as teenagers and so on and so forth, builds psychological layers inside of us which we experience in dreams. But there are also other layers, from things we are conscious about, our ego, down into parts of ourselves we rejects, things we can understand, which are within the grasp of our consciousness, further down into layers we are truly unconscious of and even further down. These parts of ourselves are like different universes we travel at night, and a dream’s content can be made up of things from all parts of ourselves, so like the shamans who travel between different outer worlds when in trance, we travel different inner worlds when we dream. This is further hinted at by the fact that you “relive variations of your life”, which is in a way something we do in our dreams, when we revisit our old school, our childhood home, and so on. Everything we have experienced in our life are inside of us, and much of that appears in our dreams, when we travel through layers of ourselves, and our history.
Baby
A baby is the start of a new life, of something completely new. For the new to live, the old must die; because if the old doesn’t go, the new cannot come. This is of course a typical theme in fairy tales (which are like collective dreams if you will), and the basis for Sir Frazer’s study in comparative religion, The Golden Bough – the old and the new king which runs like a theme throughout the book. The king can be seen as an image of the prevailing attitude, which must die for the new attitude to prevail. This is a reason for death symbolism in initiation rites – death and resurrection – and so forth. So the baby is the new “king”, attitude, or possibilities.
Unknown friend
Unknown friends or companions in dreams typically represent aspects of ourselves we are not aware of for some reason or another. The fact that the baby is hers hints at that the new possibility is part of that aspect of yours you don’t know about. In other words, if you were able to integrate that part of yourself, something new of great potentiality would come from that.
Death
But that would mean that the “old” you would “die”, and the gut reaction of any ego is of course that that cannot be allowed. Either you or the baby must die in the dream, because the dream ego represent the old, and the baby the new.
Since the baby is not yours but your room mate’s, it is far from “integration” at this point in time, and it is quite natural that the dream ego chooses herself. (If the baby were yours in the dream, it would be closer to your ability to integrate it at this point, and the dream would probably play out differently.)
The flood
The flood is a symbol of unconsciousness in this dream, I think. The baby is a symbol for a new potentiality that you are not really conscious about, and the choice is to make it conscious (“integrate” it), saving it from the flood/unconsciousness – but that would mean the death of the ego attitude – or leaving it here, having it disappear back into unconsciousness (getting flooded).
Becoming a monster
When you say you need to leave, and that the baby isn’t hers, you reject the baby both psychologically and physically. This turns the baby into a monster. On the one hand that is what happens in real life, children who are rejected grows frustrated, aggressive, and does all sorts of bad things to get attention, they turn into monsters of sorts; and on the other that is also what happens in dreams: Inner content we reject turns into something evil and dangerous – parts of ourselves that we reject often come back as aggressors, wild animals and monsters in dreams. So the rejection turns the baby into a monster. At this point your room mate “realize” that you cannot save the baby, and the reason for this is that it is too late, it has been rejected at this point in time, the rejection turns it into a monster, and as such – sinking back into the unconsciousness – it cannot be saved anymore; it is too late at this point.
The fighting off
The fact that you happen to kick your room mate instead of the monster is a hint that the room mate and the monster belong to the same psychological content. Dreams often uses that confusion to show what figures are, in my experience. Once I dreamed that I hit a person with a baseball bat, at the same time the person became my cat, so I hit my cat with that swing; so the dream told me that when I’m beating A it is really B that gets hurt – A is B, and that is what I need to realize.
The ending
The dream fades away rather than have an actual ending, so there’s no solution at this point in time. But the dynamic this dream reflects is still inside of you, and you will probably have other dreams in the future which deal with this issue, this inner potentiality of yours which you cannot connect to right now, but perhaps later on.
The other dream
In the dream about the bandits there is an interesting detail, namely that one bandit is wielding a ship anchor. That suggests that the bandits are from the sea, that is from the same big water that returns in this dream.
The sister in this dream is probably the same energy as the room mate in the other dream, so I agree that they are part of a dream series.
I hope the associations and thoughts I get when I read your dream are of any help.
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