Children's Dreams and Nightmares

Emerging Trends in Research

Siegel, Alan B.

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.

²Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alan B. Siegel, 2607 Alcatraz Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705. E-mail: [email protected].

I thank Deirdre Barrett, Tracy Green, Rosemary McBride, and Richard Russo for helpful comments on this article.

Dreaming 15(3):p 147-154, September 2005.

New manifest content analysis research on children's dreams and nightmares provides insights into how dreaming reveals developmental changes over time. Five culturally diverse research studies were conducted with varied methods for dream collection that included laboratory-collected dreams, as well as written journals, audiotaped dreams, and retrospectively recalled dreams. As children grow older, they are more able to recall dreams, dream narratives increase in length, and dreams are characterized by decreasing levels of passive victimization and have more elaborate character interactions. Age and gender differences in recall, interactions, and gender of dream characters indicate that dream research is a fertile area for studying child development and the changing function of dreams over time.