Childrens Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness

David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of childrens 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 itactive stories in which the dreamer is an actorappears 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.