UPDATE MARCH 2009
The paper described below stalled somewhat, and has now been superseded
by
- John Sutton (2009) 'Dreaming',
in Paco Calvo and John Symons
(eds), Routledge
Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology (Routledge, 2009),
522-542. There's a
discussion of Foulkes' work on children's dreaming
on pp.532-536 of that paper.
Until I find helpful collaborators with access to sleep labs, I think
any further work on dreaming may focus on questions about perspective,
and on the
comparison with the difference between 'field' and
'observer' memories; or on the threat that dreaming seems to pose to
theories of embodied and extended cognition.
Thanks heaps to my students John Buckmaster, Melanie Rosen, and Maria
Trochatos, and to Claudio Colace and Caroline Horton for help with my
work on dreams.
See also my page of references on the Interdisciplinary
Study of
Dreams which though now very out-of-date (see the 'further reading'
at the end of my chapter 'Dreaming'
for some more recent references) may
still be useful to someone.
ABSTRACT - paper in progress
John Sutton, 'Childrens' Dreams and the Nature of
Dreaming'
This work discusses the philosophical implications
of
David Foulkes' amazing experimental results. I presented a version
at
the First
Joint SPP/ ESPP Conference, Barcelona, July 3-6, 2004
Please email me with
comments or suggestions.
Back to my main publications
page.
Back to my home page.
Children’s Dreaming and Theories of Dreams
In remarkable large-scale longitudinal and cross-sectional
studies
from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the cognitive psychologist David
Foulkes
and his co-workers investigated the frequency of dream recall and the
content
of dream reports in children from age 3 to age 15. Their results were
surprising,
and conflict with many assumptions about dreaming in both folk and
scientific
psychology; but they are still strangely little-known outside dream
research.
This paper has two related aims: to pick out theoretically salient
aspects
of this experimental work for an interdisciplinary audience; and to
offer
a critical evaluation of Foulkes’ framework against the current state
of
the major theories of dreaming in cognitive science.
Dreaming in early childhood is (typically) much less frequent than in
adult
life; the content of dreams in early childhood is (typically) much less
bizarre,
more static, and less emotional, and includes fewer human characters
and
fewer events involving the self, than that of adult dreams. For
Foulkes,
this suggests that dreaming is a sophisticated cognitive achievement
rather
than a basic consequence of sentience, and involves the same sets of
information-processing
capacities as other developing cognitive processes. I defend these
results
against some obvious initial objections.
Mark Solms has argued on independent clinical and neurological grounds
that
REM sleep is neither necessary nor sufficient for dreaming, and is an
entirely
distinct phenomenon: Foulkes’ evidence supports this view. I argue
that,
indeed, it offers strong grounds to be sceptical of the reductionist
theories
of J. Allan Hobson which have been influential in recent philosophical
work
on dreams. Where Hobson identifies the source of dream bizarreness in
the
chaotic nature of brainstem signals, Foulkes rightly points to the need
for
a theory of mental representation to ground an account of the peculiar
qualities
of dreaming cognition. Taking theories of dreaming as a test case in
understanding
relations between levels of explanation, I suggest that Foulkes’ work
on
dreaming offers a promising way to unify disparate lines of
investigation
into the development of autobiographical memory and theory of mind.
Select References
G. William Domhoff, The Scientific Study of Dreams: neural
networks,
cognitive development, and content analysis
(American Psychological Assocation, 2003)
Owen Flanagan, Dreaming Souls: sleep, dreams, and the evolution
of
the conscious mind (Oxford University Press, 2000)
David Foulkes, 'Dreaming and Consciousness', European Journal of
Cognitive
Psychology 2 (1990), 39-55
David Foulkes, ‘Dream Research: 1953-1993’, Sleep 19 (1996),
609-624
David Foulkes, Children's Dreaming & the Development of
Consciousness
(Harvard University Press, 1999)
D. Foulkes, M. Hollifield, B. Sullivan, L. Bradley, & R. Terry,
‘REM
Dreaming and Cognitive Skills at Ages 5-8: a cross-sectional study’,
International Journal of Behavioral Development
13
(1990), 447-465
J. Allan Hobson, E.F. Pace-Schott, and Robert Stickgold, ‘Dreaming and
the
Brain: toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states’,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000),
793-842
Antii Revonsuo and Katja Valli, ‘Dreaming and Consciousness: testing
the
threat simulation theory of the function of dreaming', Psyche 6
(2000), at
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche-6-08-revonsuo.html
Mark Solms, The Neuropsychology of Dreams: a clinico-anatomical
study
(Erlbaum, 1997)
John Sutton, 'Cognitive Conceptions of Language and the Development of
Autobiographical
Memory', Language and Communication 22
(2002), 375-390
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page.
Last updated 25 March 2009.