What are children’s first thoughts about their dreams like? I have not
been able to collect much evidence on this head. What seems certain is
that to the simple intelligence of the child these counterfeits of
ordinary sense-presentations are real external things. The crudest
manifestation of this thought-tendency is seen in taking the
dream-apparition to be actually present in the bedroom. A boy in an
elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: “Teacher, I
saw an old woman one night against my bed”. Another child, a little
girl, in the same school told her mother that she had seen a funeral
last night, and on being asked, “Where?” answered quaintly, “I saw it in
my pillow”. A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put
him to bed in a certain room, “because there were so many dreams in the
room”. In thus materialising the dream and localising it in the actual
surroundings, the child but reflects the early thought of the race which
starts from the supposition that the man or animal which appears in a
dream is a material reality which actually approaches the sleeper.
The Nature-man, as we know from Professor Tylor’s researches, goes on to
explain dreams by his theory of souls or ‘doubles’ (animism). Children
do not often find their way to so subtle a line of thought. Much more
commonly they pass from the first stage of acceptance of objects present
to their senses to the identification of dreamland with the other and
invisible world of fairyland. There is little doubt that the imaginative
child firmly believes in the existence of this invisible world, keeps it
apart from the visible one, even though at times he may give it a
definite locality in this (_e.g._, in C.’s case, the wall of the
bedroom). He gets access to it by shutting out the real world, as when
he closes his eyes tightly and ‘thinks’. With such a child, dreams get
taken up into the invisible world. Going to sleep is now recognised as
the surest way of passing into this region. The varying colour of his
dreams, now bright and dazzling in their beauty, now black and
terrifying, may be explained by a reference to the division of that
fairy world into princes, good fairies, on the one hand, and cruel
giants, witches, and the like, on the other.
We may now pass to some of children’s characteristic ideas about living
things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic
animals. The most interesting of these I think are those respecting
growth and birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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