You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The dream is one of our most fertile sources of knowledge about the inner world of childhood and the child's unconscious mental life. The dream, in its manifest content and latent meanings, is powerfully connected with the deeper emotional currents of the child's inner life, and is a vehicle through which he seeks to assimilate and integrate his ongoing experience. Certain dreams of childhood remain compelling for the adult and may provide a kind of signpost or landmark for the early memories which it both reveals and conceals. The dream provides a window into various processes of development. Anxiety dreams or nightmares in particular provide a rich source of data about the contemporary struggles of children and their link to earlier fears and conflicts. Through the child's dream we can study affective and cognitive development and learn about the growth of mental organization. The developing structures of language and their link to powerful drives and compelling emotional experiences can be approached through the exploration of the child's dream. The impetus to creativity is best seen in the tendency of children to elaborate their dreams into stories and dramas—proclivities which can be facilitated when the child is encouraged to communicate his dream experience to others. In his novel When the Tree Sings (1979), Stratis Haviaras tells of a small boy who was trapped for several hours underground in a tomb. He relived the terrifying experience in repetitive dreams. In her advice to him his grandmother shows a deep understanding of the importance of dreams in childhood for keeping alive the memories of troubling experience and even permitting its ultimate integration through creative activity:
She also said that I should try not to forget the details of my accident and what I was afraid of while I waited to be rescued. Nor should I forget the thoughts that were connected with it, or the dreams I'd had since then. "Because if you do forget them, a good part of you would be trapped in that tomb forever," she said. I started writing down everything on a sheet of paper, but I couldn't remember very much, and I soon realized that I was making up most of the dreams and stories,