The mother of our youngest grandchild, age three, sent each one in the family this email:
His daycare provider shared this exchange with me:
Daycare Provider: Love, you need to take your glasses off for nap time.
Three Year Old: No.
Daycare Provider: Why not?
Three Year Old: If I take off my glasses, how will I see in my dreams?
How cute is this! However, it led this Grandma thinking. What do Three-Year-Olds Dream?
I love the internet. I put the question into google and found that there are studies about whether three year old dream and what they dream. Most studies asked that because “[t]hree- and four-year-old children have REM sleep, the stage of sleep most associated, in adults, with vivid, narrative dreams. It’s natural to suppose they also dream. But do they?”
Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside, posed that question in his on line blog and wrote about his own son:
My son Davy, at four, only very rarely claimed to dream — despite my wife’s repeatedly asking him about his dreams (she was trained as a psychotherapist!) — and when he did confess to a dream, his reports were suspicious for a number of reasons: vague, short, and often just a repetition of something he had claimed to dream before. I’d say about half Davy’s dream reports were simply this: “the house was full of popcorn”, with no further elaboration to be coaxed from him.
Eric Schwitzgebel quoted an early study by David Foulkes who “systematically woke three- to five-year-old children during REM sleep and found that they generally denied dreaming. If they did give dream reports, those reports were generally short and suspect in a variety of ways. He argues that dreaming is a skill that develops, much as visual imagery is a skill that develops. (There is at least a little evidence that young children are pretty bad at visual imagery.)”
Eric Schwitzgebel ends the entire post with a question, “Now I don’t know. Children not dreaming? That’s kind of hard to swallow. But I’ve begun to doubt.”
There were several posts by visitors to the blog. I liked this one and Eric Schwitzgebel’s response:
My daughter, who’s almost four, reports some pretty elaborate dreams. I must admit, though, that it often seems like she’s making it up on the spot. Not sure how to test that hunch.
Eric Schwitzgebel said…Yes Pete, I wonder, too, how much of it is a memory thing. Foulkes claims that in the three- to five-year-old range, dream reporting does not correlate with general cognitive abilities or with maturity. If this is true, that might support the idea that it’s confabulation at work in your four-year-old. Here’s a potential test of the confabulation idea: Have some salient, novel objects in the environment around the child when she wakes up. If those are included in the dream report, you can be pretty sure you’ve got confabulation.
Okay. I had no idea what confabulation was either. According to www.dictionary.com, it means the replacement of a gap in a person’s memory by a falsification that he or she believes is true.
There were two newer studies that were interesting. One was from a journal called Cognitive Development, 7, 365-380 (1992), “Children’s Conceptions of Dreams,” by Jacqueline D. Woolley, University of Texas, and Henry M. Wellman, University of Michigan. They concluded:
Children’s conceptions of dreams are an important component of their developing understanding of the mind. Although there is much that even adults do not understand about the nature of dreams, most adults in Western society believe that: Dream entities are not real in the sense that they are nonphysical; they are private in the sense that they are not available to public perception, and are not directly shared with other dreamers; and, dreams are typically fictional in content. Thus, children in our society must confront several dualisms with respect to dreams, such as their physical versus nonphysical, perceptually-public versus per- ceptually-private, and shared versus individuated nature. Thirty-two children, aged 3- and 4-years-old, were told stories about children who were dreaming about an object, playing with an object, or looking at a photograph of an object, and then were asked questions about the status of these entities with regard to these three dualisms.
All children judged dream entities, photographs, and physical objects to be appropriately different in terms of physical versus nonphysical properties and in terms of perceptually-public versus private status. They also understood the fictional nature of dreams. However, whereas most 4-year-olds understood that dreams are individuated, many 3-year-olds believed that dreams are directly shared by more than one person.
The scientists distinguished the earlier David Foulkes study quoted by Eric Schwitzgebel.
These findings contrast with earlier research characterizing children’s understanding of dreams as realistic. We reconcile these contrasting findings by discussing methodological differences, and we situate our findings regarding children’s understanding of dreams within the context of contemporary research on children’s theory of mind.
Then an even newer study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2004), 22, 293-310 2004, “Do monsters dream? Young children’s understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction,” by Tanya Sharon, Emory University, and Jacqueline D. Woolley, University of Texas, confirmed the current thinking on dreams of three and four year olds:
Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second
look at preschoolers’ fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation-a property attribution task-in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also modified the standard forced-choice categorization task (into real/fantastical) to include a `not sure’ option, thus allowing children to express uncertainty. Finally, we assessed the relation between individual levels of fantasy orientation and fantasy/reality differentiation. Results suggest that children have a more developed appreciation of the boundary between fantasy and reality than is often supposed.
This Grandma may not understand all the terminology these scientists are using but I do understand that the three year old of today is more sophisticated and worldly than the three year old of the past. After all, this three year old was successfully using an I Pad at a little over a year old!
After this Google search result, all of the remaining results were about three and four year olds and nightmares. It appears that nightmares are common in this age group. However, this three year old always smiles. He is the happiest of all of the grandchildren all of the time. This Grandma is not interested in nightmares and this three year old right now.
We just returned from our multigenerational family vacation where this three year old was the center of attention from every generation and every member of the family. He is the adored and coddled baby of the family. This Grandma just knows that his dreams are as sweet and happy as he is.
I read the email again,
Daycare Provider: Love, you need to take your glasses off for nap time.
Three Year Old: No.
Daycare Provider: Why not?
Three Year Old: If I take off my glasses, how will I see in my dreams?
Now I know a little bit more about how he dreams, that he knows they are dreams, and that he looks forward to enjoying his dreams. Such
Joy,
Mema
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