Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness

Download or read book Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness written by David Foulkes and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.