children and dreams

I noticed that children tend to have more spontaneous LDs than adults, and that the LDs of most people occur during their childhood. Is there some scientific explanation of that?
And another thing, at what age do children starts distinguishing between dreams and RL?

In children’s brains, nerve paths aren’t so strengthened compared with adult brains. The chances that a signal will take a specific neural path is still highly uniform along many areas of the brain. In adult brains, external influences, especially the conditioning process, has resulted in the strengthening of neural pathways which correspond with the model through which the conditioned adult perceives the world. Children do not have this kind of narrow-mindedness yet. Raising children in current Western society involves an inherent negligence of phenomena which are poorly understood, such as dreaming. There’s not really someone to blame, because this is the result of a long social evolution. Because of the uniformity of the neural pathways in children’s brains, some pathways will be taken more easier during childhood, than when they’re adult. These pathways are exactly the ones which, through conditioning, get repressed and will highly diminish in activity. For instance the pathways which lead to LDs. This might explain why adults need to put so much effort in it in order to restrengthen these pathways.

A few weeks ago I read about this somewhere in a book…

Aargh

Can’t remember :sad:

i read that kids don’t even have a sense of self in their dreams until around … ughh… what’s the term… aronud 5-7 or something?

I honestly don’t remember my dreams before I was 8, I know I had them, I remember having nightmares… well okay yeah I remember one now, I had a sense of self, I wonder how old I was.

well anyway… supposedly they dream in third person for quite a while until they become egocentric, and though I have taken developmental psychology I’m failing to remember when it is that kids become egocentric… because like 7-11ish they sort of become more, less egocentrated and want to help out and “fit in” and shit… so…

hmmm…

arghh maybe this dreaming thing isn’t true, I read it on some guys site, he says his kid was jealous of him because he got to be “himself” while dreaming.

well i’d say 3-6 you might not dream of “yoruself” as much, as it takes a while to learn to separate yourself from all other facets of reality, and then it must take that much longer to get that burned into your subconscious enough to show up in your dreams.

I’ve looked it up and this is what Ken Wilber has to say about it:

Age 2-4: consciousness is dominated by symbols. These symbols are not distinguished from the objects they represent. The manipulation of a mental image is the same as the actual manipulation of the real object. Inner and outer world are both highly egocentric. Magical thinking. So dreams are seen as no different from waking reality.

Age 4-7: concentration of the ego. The child understands that the outer world doesn’t react to his/her wishes and commands. But someone else has this power: gods, elves, demons, dragons,… This is mythological thinking. Dreams and nightmares are seen as something happening, separate from the outer world. But the demons, dragons and other creatures that appear in dreams are interpreted as real beings which have the power to change both worlds, inner and outer.

Age 6/7-11/14: The child finally learns to take someone else’s view. He/she has the power now to make up his own mental rules. Dreams are regarded as inner experiences which must be some part of them. There’s a clear distinction between dreams and waking life.

Sounds logical to me :smile:

I think it makes sense :content:
thanks !!

Hehe, that made me think…I was chatting on msn with my little cousin, we were talking about dreaming, and she told me about nightmares she used to have. She said she walked around the house, sleepwalking with her eyes open…she could see her house and everything but she was also in the nightmare… talk about not being able to distinguish a dream from RL :wink:

I’m 12 and I used to have tons of nightmares, probably the ony dreams I used to remember were nightmares. But in the past year or so my dreams have been sorta different in the way that I’ve not had any distinct nightmares, more dreams that are like that. I wonder if that has anything to do with my age or something else? :eh: I tend to have random LDs, like there is no proof that I am dreaming I just ‘notice’ it, like it just feels like a dream.

Interesting. I had lots of nightmares as a kid - I have a feeling it was just the ‘shock’ of becoming conscious of real life (stepping out of the fantasy stage). I figure once you’re past that you can dream ‘normally’. As for the dream actually just ‘feeling’ like a dream, that’s interesting, I never really notice it…I guess you just have a really good grip on what real life feels like :smile: Wish I could say the same :wink:

I came across this thread and thought I’d throw something out there.

I have an 8 year old son who has a hard time sleeping. Falling asleep because he says he’s afraid of his dreams. Just recently I’ve been giving him things to put under his pillow. More for comfort but at the same time in hopes that he would bring these images into his dream. I tell him little things like remember what you have under those pillows and if you get a little scared in your dream look for what I put under there.

I just hate nightmares and feel so bad for him. Based on what I’ve read here, he might not be too young for me to try and incorporate lucid dreaming (just to get him out of a scary situation).

Any comments?

Well lucid dreaming is a powerful tool for fighting nightmares. I read somewhere (unfortunately, I don’t remember where) about a man, probably a sleep researcher, who taught his son how to transform his nightmares into LDs and conquer them. I’ll try to check about his age. I think you should try to teach your son about that. He might benefit greatly from it. But of course that is just my opinion, and I’m not an expert.

My cousin is about 10 years old. I was chatting with him and he told me that sometimes he knows that he is dreaming and makes a camera appear, and when he takes a picture with it he gets to make one wish come true. I can’t imagine what would happen if I rty to train to LD at will.

What sort of things do you put under his pillow?

I put maybe a toy that he likes, sometimes a few YuGiOh cards or his remote control.

I tell him on especially rough nights that he can carry these things with him in his dreams. If he gets scared to look for them in his dream because they are there. And when he finds them that’s when he knows he is dreaming and that’s when he can change the dream. Sometimes I tell him to think of me in the dream so that I can be in there with him.

The only fear I have is that a child’s imagination is great. And what if he imagines something getting worse.

I’d be more than interested to look at the information you find. Thanks

And then you have the Freud Cycles.

And that would be…?

my ? exactly…

Google it…

I had my first LD when i was about maybe 7-8 years old or even maybe a bit younger. I also had quite a few dreams as a kid, and i am really pretty sure they were first person.

That lucid dream is still one of the longest and most intense ones upto this date.

I also had my first LD around the age of 7. (I’m 13 now) I just remember telling everyone in my dream “I’m only dreaming!!” and jumped off the building I was in, because I knew it was only a dream. Then these credits popped up like they do at the end of the movie, and I woke up. Pretty odd, haha.

I WILDed when I was 6-7 and also could voluntarily induce hypnagogics, very very vivid amusing great fun ones, at that age.
my parents and society destroyed those talents…

i remember how easy it was, I was thinking, making up a scene, then bam it was a dream, but it scared me because it was on asubject I was scared of, I was imagining it being happy so it wouldn’t scare me, but then it kind of did a little bit.

the hallucinatins, well, people just looked at me like i’m werid, so i sort of stoped making myself have them… they were voluntary, just little distortions of reality, it involved spacing out and watching patterns form and distort and stuff.

any age past 4 should be fine for trying to teach them to LD… and the putting the objects under your kids pillow is a great idea, hopefully it will increase his lucidity and confidence…

if your child has any phobias, now is the time to fix them, or he may be stuck with them forever, as well.

yeah I remember when I was a child I “discovered” a technique for inducing hypnagogia,… I used to use it to fall asleep quickly… but I stopped using it and now I can’t do it anymore :sad: But I never got to WILDing back then, it’s really cool that you did holy reality :smile: