Dreams of Early Childhood

Sometimes very young children, our 4 and 5 year old's, have experiences with us that we are not aware of! My four year old daughter, Ina, woke up the other morning and began asking me why I did x and why we did x and how come I did x when she did y and so forth. For the life of me I could not remember what events or episodes she was referring to and then it began to dawn on me that she was talking about dreams that she had had where she and I had played together or gone some place together. For her the dream was real and she assumed that I had experienced everything that she had experienced in her dream.

Ina's four year old cousin Adam once told his mom that he was at the subway station and he fell down to the rails. The subway was coming and he could hardly escape. He believed for days that it had really happened to him and his mom had to do her best to convince him: it was only a dream. In short, very young children need to learn the difference between dream and reality and until they do they sometimes have experiences with and without us that we are not aware of!

Now those two conclusions are very striking facts: that 1) children need to learn the difference between dream and reality and 2) that very young children have experiences with us that we are not aware of. With regard to number 2, that children believe dreams with their parents are real shared experiences with parents,

I wonder how that fact influences child-parent relationships? If a 3 or 4 year old dreams that he and his mom went through a traumatic scary experience together does not that increase the trust the child has in his mom? Or conversely if a 3 or 4 year old daughter had dreamed that she and her Dad had played a game in a certain way in her dream should she not expect her Dad to remember the way they had played together in the dream? If the Dad does not remember this special game then should not the daughter get mad at the Dad and the Dad be bewildered by this reaction?

With respect to number 1, that the child has to learn the difference between dream and reality, current data points to that difference being learned sometime between the ages of 3 and 5. Meyer and Shore (2001) performed experiments with children and in addition gave the children theory of mind tasks designed to assess level of understanding that mental states were private events, that we could not see what others were thinking and they others could not see what we were thinking and so forth. Theory of mind developments in 5 year olds were, in fact, correlated with children's understanding of the reality and the privacy of dreams.

So at around 5 years old most children seem to learn that the adults around them construe ‘dreams' to be non-real psychological occurrences that they experience privately by themselves. In cultures where dreams are construed as real events in the world the 5 year old apparently just continues with his or her ‘default assumption' that dreams are real and shared experiences rather than non-real and private experiences. Thus, Mother Nature gives us a choice concerning the ontological weight that we as a culture assign to dreams and this decision concerning the meaning of dreams is so important to culture that the decision must be made by the time we are five!

My daughter Ina and her cousin Adam both seem to have resisted the modern decision to treat dreams as private and non-real but alas they have little real choice in the matter. When all is said and done the regnant culture makes the decision for them. The kids can resist for a while and can even support one another in that resistance but eventually they have to accept the culture's definitions of what is real and meaningful if they hope to remain ‘in-step' with that culture as they ‘mature'. As Wordsworth in his Ode ‘Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood' once said:

"THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. 5 It is not now as it hath been of yore;- Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more."

References
Woolley, J.D. and Boerger, E. (2002) Development of Beliefs About the Origins and Controllability of Dreams, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 1, 24-41

Meyer and Shore (2001). Children's understanding of dreams as mental states.
Dreaming, Vol 11(4),. pp. 179-194.