My 6 month old grandson woke up shrieking. We thought there was something wrong-- very wet, pinched a finger, gas but when I picked him up all he wanted to do was put his arms around my neck and have me comfort him until he very quickly calmed down. I said it must have been a nightmare but my son, who has been reading up on babies ever since he got one of his own, says that babies don’t dream until well past 1 year old.
So, what’s the straight dope? Do babies dream?
I would have assumed yes, but maybe no.
I suspect they do and have no reason to think they don’t. Why wouldn’t they?
Read the article I linked.
The first nightmare I can remember took place when I was still in a crib, so I guess that would qualify as having a nightmare as a baby. I dreamed there were balloons floating over my crib with horrible scowling faces.
At six months? Probably not, according to Dr. David Foulkes, a leading pediatric dream expert, in an article in LiveScience. Babies spend about 50% of their sleep in the REM stage, the phase in which dreams occur. But at six months, babies sleep an average of 14.5 hours per 24 hour period. That’s 7.25 hours of REM, a lot of dream time for babies who have very little life experience and whose brains are relatively undeveloped.
But what IS going on during that REM time is pretty crucial stuff:
So why DID your grandson cry out? REM sleep is not very deep, and babies typically twitch and make noises. They may even waken enough that a gas pain or mild hunger can trigger brief cries. So your son is right, no nightmares, but oh, what amazing stuff your grandson IS doing during sleep.
I’ve seen more than one sleeping baby moving her lips as if she were nursing, so either she was dreaming about nursing or her mouth was just going through some sort of autonomous motions for some un-discernible reason.
That’s really impossible to know, unless you can find a precocious baby that is able to understand and answer complete sentences. I think there are quite a few that have been able to do that by age three, but that is more toddler years.
I remember my son asking my wife about his dream about a blue bug. My wife said she didn’t he was talking about, and he said, “but you were there!” He was quite young, an early talker and reader, but unfortunately I can’t remember his exact age.
I do believe babies dream, and they probably dream in the womb even. It is probably more like a blind person’s dream though, lacking visuals. I don’t believe you have to be verbal to dream.
I did. They have no evidence. Their logic seems to be “well babies are immature and shit, so they probably don’t dream”.
I reiterate what I said.
So, on the one hand we have this guy’s views, and on the other hand, yours.
Hmmm. (Making “weighing options with hands” motion.)
There’s evidence that fetuses dream.
Agreed. From what I’ve read, REM sleep is necessary for the health of the brain and is an integral part of any healthy human’s sleep cycle. There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that babies are or even should be any different.
God, I hate LiveScience.com with a burning passion that I normally reserve for white supremicists and people who bring food into live theatre, not just because of all of the spawning modal windows and clickbait ad frames that have to keep refreshing and causing the page to reload, but also because it is the shitiest debasement of popular science short of “creation science”.
Yes, babies and small chlidren enter a dream state as does any create with a neocortex. Given their relatively primitive conception of the world and nascent memory recall, infants and toddlers almost certainly don’t produce any kind of structured narrative that adults do but at a biochemical level dreaming essentially resets neurotransmitter balance, particularly especially serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. Anyone who says, “Babies don’t dream until well past 1 year old,” knows little about babies and nothing about neuroscience.
Stranger
The guy quoted in the article, David Foulkes, seems to be a pretty significant figure:
This is a Google preview of his book on the subject. (Googling for the book title will give you a link to a PDF of the full book on the first page, too.)
Some of his stuff seems pretty questionable to me but I’m not finding anything directly denouncing him.
For a counter, there is this.
I’d dispute this. Every day babies encounter things that are completely new to them. Things that you and I take for granted. They probably have many more “life experiences” every day that need processing than we do. And their immature brains may mean that they are slower to do it.
I only skimmed the referenced paper to Foulkes’ work, but I’ll point out that pretty much everything that was held dear in neuroscience circa 1980 has been almost comprehensively overturned by more recent work in neurochemistry, affective and cognitive neuroscience, and functional brain imaging. The problem with relying on the subjective impressions of children about their necessarily internal recollecton of dreams is that they lack a consistent experience for any kind of objective evaluation, and in fact lack the necessary vocabulary to even coherently express the imagery or concepts in dreams.
On the other hand, while we don’t really understand the specific evolutionary ‘purpose’ of dreams, they do seem to be a combination of largely involuntary memory recall, internal processing by the affective systems about emotional conflicts, and internal synthesis by sensory systems in absense of external stimuli (and may often integrate outside sounds or other sensory information into a more complex experience); in short, they’re controlled hallucinations. This is not entirely surprising since the rhythms of sleep correspond to a redistribution of the previously mentioned neurotransmitters in a fashion not entirely unlike the effects of psychopharamceuticals.
In fact, all infants have are “life experiences”; they don’t have enough of a developed vocabulary or logical processess to have an internal dialogue or daydreams, so they spend their entire first couple years of life basically absorbing everything around them and trying to integrate it into an internal model that permits them to interact with the world. The dreams of an infant or small chlid are probably just a jumble of memories and blunt emotions rather than any kind of narrative but they definitely have the same processes going on at a neurochemical level even if the cognitive structures are not as well formed as an older child or an adult.
And although it is a single and subjective datum, I have clear memories of dreams with narratives and vivid imagery from the age of three or even earlier. I frankly remember some of those early dreams better than I remember the dreams I had last night because they were so novel and surprising (and sometimes frightening).
Stranger
Do babies dream of juvenile sheep?
Ewe, you should be lambasted for that!
That humans only dream during REM sleep is a misconception. There are several sources, but a quick google gives this, among other sources:
From the article:
I see no reason why, if this is true, it’s incompatible with dreaming. In fact, “build pathways, become integrated” is something I’ve heard as the possible reason we dream. So why would that rule out dreaming in babies? If anything it would cause me to think babies dream more than adults, because they sleep more than adults and a larger portion of that sleep is REM sleep.
Also:
This contradicts my own and others’ experience. I distinctly remember some of my early dreams as a toddler. They were no different, subjectively, than dreams I’ve had since or recently. I have no reason to believe babies don’t dream, or that young children don’t dream in the same way as older children or adults, and this article has not convinced me otherwise. Despite the professional qualifications of its author.