Unpleasant Dreams in Childhood

Foster, Josephine C.; Anderson, John E.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1936.tb05471.x

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…There has been a: fair amount of research concerning differences in dream content for various age groups in children (4,11,16,29,31,42,48). While some studies have analysed dream content at older ages (1,2,7,33,44) no previous studies have examined broad age groupings within a random sample of adults as a factor related to the type of dream content.…”

Section: Age Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreams and Demography

Winget

Kramer

Whitman

1972

Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal

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Section: Age Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreams and Demography

Winget

Kramer

Whitman

1972

Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal

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“…The evidence for sex differences in frequency of dreaming among children is contradictory. Foster and Anderson (31) found no reliable sex differences in their investigation of the number of unpleasant dreams of 519 children. On the other hand, Witty and Kopel (120), in their report of 3,394 children, found that girls reported a slightly greater number of dreams than did boys.…”

Section: Sex Differencesmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…For example, Foster and Anderson (31) and Despert (23) stated that the children in their respective studies did not report any erotic or sex dreams. This is not surprising since they did not ask about such dreams and depended solely upon the spontaneous reports of the children upon a socially disapproved topic.…”

Section: Studies Op Dreamingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studies of dreaming.

Ramsey¹

1953

Psychological Bulletin

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“…Foulkes' results provided a surprising alternative to the general opinion about young children's dreams considered to be relatively vivid, colorful and creative with strong feelings, especially negative ones appearing in form of frequent nightmares (Kimmins, 1920 ; Foster and Anderson, 1936 ; Despert, 1949 ), In his study 3 to 5 year-olds reported infrequent (17% of REM awakenings) and brief (average 14 words) dream reports, that usually lacked movements and actions (static imagery), emotions, an active self-character and a clear storyline. Moreover, human characters and interactions rarely appeared in the reports, instead children frequently dreamt about body-state themes, especially those relating to the sleeping self, and about animals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Content analysis of 4 to 8 year-old children's dream reports

et al. 2015

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The role of dreaming in childhood and in adulthood are still equally enigmatic fields yet to be fully explored. However, while there is a consensus at least about the typical content and formal characteristics of adult dream reports, these features are still a matter of debate in the case of young children. Longitudinal developmental laboratory studies concluded that preschoolers' dreams usually depict static images about mostly animals and body states of the dreamer but they basically lack the active representation of the self, human characters, social interactions, dream emotions and motion imagery. Due to methodological arguments these results became the reference points in the literature of developmental dream research, in spite of the significantly different results of numerous recent and relevant studies using extra-laboratory settings. This study aims to establish a methodologically well-controlled and valid way to collect children's dreams for a representative period of time in a familiar home setting to serve as a comparison to the laboratory method. Pre trained parents acted as interviewers in the course of a 6 week-period of dream collection upon morning awakenings. Our results suggest that even preschoolers are likely to represent their own self in an active role (70%) in their mostly kinematic (82%) dream narratives. Their dream reports contain more human, than animal characters (70 and 7% of all dream characters respectively), and social interactions, self-initiated actions, and emotions are usual part of these dreams. These results are rather similar to those of recent extra-laboratory studies, suggesting that methodological issues may strongly interfere with research outcomes especially in the case of preschoolers' dream narratives. We suggest that nighttime awakenings in the laboratory setting could be crucial in understanding the contradictory results of dream studies in case of young children.

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Unpleasant Dreams in Childhood

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Dreams and Demography

Dreams and Demography

Studies of dreaming.

Content analysis of 4 to 8 year-old children's dream reports

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