The Earliest Dreams of a Young Child

A former patient, mother of three children, provided me with a record of the dreams of her eldest son, Johnny, between the ages of seventeen and forty-seven months. The child, now four years of age, has two younger siblings, two-year-old Charlie and ten-months-old Sandy. The mother, a very intelligent and reliable observer, recorded the child's dreams verbatim each time they were communicated to her or to her husband (or both) by the young dreamer, usually after the latter's awakening in the morning. The dreams, as reported by Johnny, were brought to my attention the same day; their content and wording (if any), mode of appearance, the ascertainable circumstances under which they occurred, accompanying experiences, etc., are presented in the account that follows. Because of their small number—eleven dreams altogether—no attempt will be made to classify them or to use them as the basis for specific formulations on the nature, function, and significance of childhood dreams. A short discussion, in the second part of this paper, is limited to some observations on the child's experiences as well as their relation to the relatively few comparable data in the analytic literature.1

Dream I. The first experience reported as a dream was a nightmare and nonverbal. It occurred when Johnny was seventeen months old. The child, usually a sound sleeper, woke up screaming during the night. It took some time, perhaps an hour or so, until the parents were able to calm the crying and obviously frightened child. During the day preceding this nocturnal experience Johnny had been taken