David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children’s dreaming, and a pioneer of sleep laboratory research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it—active stories in which the dreamer is an actor—appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. He argues that this late development of dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.
Foulkes offers a spirited defense of the independence of the psychological realm, and the legitimacy of studying it without either psychoanalytic over-interpretation or neurophysiological reductionism.
David Foulkes was Director of the dream research laboratories at the University of Wyoming and at the Georgia Mental Health Institute (GMHI) in Atlanta.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Challenging the Assumptions
2. How to Study Children's Dreams
The Justification of Sleep-Laboratory Methods
Are Sleep-Laboratory Dreams "Real" Dreams?
3. The Two Studies
The Longitudinal Study
The Cross-Sectional Study
4. Ages Three to Five
Paucity of Dreams
What People are Saying About This
Allen Rechtschaffen
Reporting on what is by far the most comprehensive scientific study ever done of dreaming in children, David Foulkes argues convincingly that the appearance of dreams during the preschool and early primary years both depends on and demonstrates the development of essential cognitive processes. With a gift for seeing the deepest implications of his data, Foulkes takes his readers from the data of dream reports and sleep electrophysiology to profound observations on the narrative structure, emotional characteristics, cognitive qualities, and stimulus determinants of dreams. This is the authoritative work on childhood dreaming; it will have no rivals for many years to come. Allen Rechtschaffen, Director, Sleep Research Laboratory, University of Chicago
William Domhoff
Based on 35 years of brilliant dream research in the sleep laboratory, Foulkes has gone Freud one better by making dream experience the royal road to understanding consciousness. What he has to say cannot be ignored by cognitive psychologists and philosophers of consciousness who want their theories to be consistent with the best scientific evidence in every domain of human experience. William Domhoff, author of The Mystique of Dreams and Finding Meaning in Dreams