Dream about leaving my baby somewhere I never would

I had a dream that I had left my 4month old baby girl with my mom for the day (someone I would never in a million years leave her alone with in real life, the very thought gives me anxiety). I did a bunch of stuff that seems irrelevant: watched my husband quote building a massive fence (which is his real life job), and helped my birthing coach make dinner. I suddenly realized where I left my baby and panicked, my birth coach drove me to my moms to get her. When we got there my little girl was in the basement, crying and obviously hungry. When I asked my mom if she had fed her she said "oh, she hasn't stopped eating, all I have done all day is give her bottle after bottle after bottle" which felt like a lie. My mom was very frustrated that I had inconvenienced her and said (I'll use more polite words than she said in my dream) that my baby ruined her day as she got in the way of her sex life. I felt so sick that I had left the most precious and important person in the world alone with someone who didn't care about her at all. I went to feed my baby a bottle but when I looked down at her she was a small black bird... (looked like a black lovebird with a long tail and white around her eyes) but it seemed normal she was a bird... !? I got her little cage from the basement and put all of my daughters real life toys in to make comfortable so we could leave...*

What the heck!?*

On a side note, I had a pet lovebird as a teen but had to leave him with my mom when I moved out, the next time I came to visit he had died. My little sister (4 at the time) reported he wasn't being fed.*

The first part of the dream certainly seems like an expression of your anxieties. A dream is a healthy place to release those. The part about the black lovebird reminds me of a dream I had recently about my mother.

My Mom was old and suffered from Alzheimer's and psychosis. She was also on an all-liquid diet, so she was not very strong. I dreamed about her, seeing her as a normal individual at first, but when I started to put her to bed, she was a fragile china bowl that I held wrapped in newspaper in the bend of my arm like a baby. I interpreted this as my mother being fragile, rare, precious, vulnerable, that sort of thing.

It might be the same for you. You mention how you felt about the lovebird, and it seems the dream portrayed your daughter in that way as an image of how you feel about her in certain ways, like I saw my mom.

From that perspective, it is another expression of your inner anxieties, this time a deep-seated mistrust. Acknowledgement of these kinds of feelings and dealing with them is healthy, allows you to grow, and that is probably the message of the dream.

The way I see it, you have a deep distrust in your mother and you have since you were a teen. I think the baby had a great meaning in the dream. You assumed the baby was starving. This symbolizes that you may have a great dependence on others maybe your daughter herself. She is making you very happy which is normal for a mother. You also say the baby was crying. This symbolizes you are deprived of attention and need some nurturing. Maybe you feel neglected. I don't know the ins and outs with your mother but maybe if you had a bad relationship with her you may be holding on to your daughter to make sure the same doesn't happen with you and her.