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Decoding kids' nightmares

An inside look at children's dreams

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Originally published in Today's Parent February 2011

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It’s early evening at the Lehman* house, and the Toronto family is winding down. Mom Debra checks that six-year-old Donald has her old tank top to sleep with, a comfort item she gave him when he started having the odd scary dream. Meanwhile, Joshua, four, is asking his dad, Allan, if he remembers when they were in India and a monkey licked his face. Allan realizes it must be one of Joshua’s vivid dreams — the family’s never been to India.

Often sweet and sometimes sour, dreams can play a big role in family life. So whether your crew swaps tales at breakfast, or you’ve ever soothed your kid after a 3 a.m. nightmare, here’s everything you need to know about your child’s dreams.

Why kids dream

The purpose of dreams is hotly debated among researchers, but there are two common theories:

To learn Some believe dreams help nudge memories from the area of the brain that stores short-term memories to the long-term archive. For example, a 2010 Harvard Medical School study found that people who learned a task (finding a landmark in a 3-D computer maze) and then took a nap and dreamed about it, performed better when they tried it again, compared to those who didn’t nap or didn’t dream of the maze during their nap. The dreams may be a sign that the brain is working on a problem at different levels.

To deal with life’s emotions Researchers speculate that the brain deals with negative emotions by putting them in a different context — in dreams — which diffuses them. “Children tend to have more bad dreams and nightmares in stressful times in their lives. This suggests that dreams may indeed serve to process the emotions of the day,” says Valérie Simard, a professor of psychology at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, who specializes in parent-child relationships and sleep and dreaming in children.

So who’s right? Maybe both. Research shows that during rapid eye movement (or REM, the period of sleep where most dreams happen), activity spikes in the areas of the brain that regulate both memory and emotion.

*Names changed by request.

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