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Contributions to the study of children's dreams are relatively infrequent. It
was therefore with pleasure that I greeted a book devoted entirely to children's dreams. In his introduction, the author, who is Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology), at Emory University, points out that neither students of child development nor research psychophysiologists who have studied REM sleep and dreams of adults have paid much attention to children's dreams. Foulkes has been studying dreams for more than twenty years, and is the author of a number of publications on sleep and dreams including several previous reports on children's dreams. In this book, he intends "to show that the systematic study of children's dreams has a great deal to tell us both about child development and about what our minds do during the substantial portion of our lives when we are asleep." In addition, he wished to compare the content of children's dreams at different ages with those of adults, and to inquire into the relation of dreams to intelligence, sex, fantasies, and personality.
There were two concurrent longitudinal dream studies of children made in a university sleep-laboratory setting. The same children were examined over five-year periods beginning at, respectively, ages 3 or 4 and ages 9 or 10. The premise of the project was that longitudinal studies would provide greater understanding of children's dreams than cross-sectional studies, especially if information about each child's waking life situation could be obtained. To achieve this, the researcher set up a combined sleep laboratory and nursery school.
The children were awakened on the basis of stages of sleep, as identified in the recording, and were asked immediately to describe the dreams they were having just before being awakened. The interviewer asked direct questions: "What were you dreaming about?" "What could you see?" "What people were in it; who were they; were you in it?"
In years 1, 3, and 5 of the study, designated