Kimmins, C. W. Children's Dreams, An Unexplored Land. [London:  George Allen and Unwin.]

The dreams of healthy school children collected on a wholesale scale and without selection of either children or dreams are made the basis of Dr. Kimmins’ suggestion that dreams might be so collected and studied as part of the regular school curriculum with a view to casting more light on the “special interests and desires of the child at different ages, and … on those elements which are conspicuously lacking in the life of the child and which may seriously interfere with his natural development.” The most obvious of these are underfeeding and undue stress and strain. The doctor was in a particularly happy position for gathering this material, since as Chief Inspector of the London County Council Schools he had the cooperation of principals and teachers. The collected dreams are analyzed on the basis of age, outstanding physical conditions, such as blindness and deafness, and other less clearly defined criteria.

The classifications made by Dr. Kimmins are obviously based on the manifest content of the dreams, without consideration of symbolism or latent content. Some of his chief statistical divisions are wish-fulfillment and fear dreams, kinaesthetic dreams, ghost and fairy story dreams, dreams about school activities, dreams in which conversations are recorded, about Christmas, about dangerous animals, etc. These are correlated to the ages of the dreams with a view to suggesting the type of change to be expected in dreams as children grow older. For example, he finds that at five the child is the actor in the dream, family relationships are not fully recognized, and dreaming and waking elements are confused. At seven, members of the family group take part in the dream, the child becomes less the central figure, and he recognizes more clearly the differences between dreaming and waking. Particularly interesting are the conclusions reached about the dreams of deaf and blind children. For example the doctor reports that the deaf child rarely has a kinaesthetic dream,