Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness

David Foulkes, David FOULKES

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674009714
  9780674116207
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674037168
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Challenging the Assumptions
• 2. How to Study Children’s Dreams
• 3. The Two Studies
• 4. Ages Three to Five
• 5. Ages Five to Nine
• 6. Ages Nine to Fifteen
• 7. Dreaming
• 8. Consciousness
• Appendix: Two Children’s Dream Reports over Time
• References
• Index