Do Three-Year-Olds Dream?
Three- and four-year-old children have REM sleep, the stage of sleep most associated, in adults, with vivid, narrative dreams. It's natural to suppose they also dream. But do they?
My son Davy, at four, only very rarely claimed to dream -- despite my wife's repeatedly asking him about his dreams (she was trained as a psychotherapist!) -- and when he did confess to a dream, his reports were suspicious for a number of reasons: vague, short, and often just a repetition of something he had claimed to dream before. I'd say about half Davy's dream reports were simply this: "the house was full of popcorn", with no further elaboration to be coaxed from him.
Usually Davy claimed not to have slept at all. He generally seemed to have no awareness of the night's passing while he slept -- a fact that continually surprised my wife and me, given how sophisticated he was about many other things. No reference to clocks, the sun, to our seeing him lying still for hours, etc., could persuade him otherwise.
David Foulkes (e.g., in his 1999 book) systematically woke three- to five-year-old children during REM sleep and found that they generally denied dreaming. If they did give dream reports, those reports were generally short and suspect in a variety of ways. He argues that dreaming is a skill that develops, much as visual imagery is a skill that develops. (There is at least a little evidence that young children are pretty bad at visual imagery.) This would make sense if dreaming is just a form of (visually and otherwise) imagining (see Jonathan Ichikawa's interesting discussion of this).
Now I don't know. Children not dreaming? That's kind of hard to swallow. But I've begun to doubt.