.3 ~ 9-year-old Children's Understanding Of Dreams

Great deals of researches have been done during the past 20 years on the development of children's knowledge about mental states (theory-of-mind). These researches showed that by the end of the preschool years, children knew at least something of what in means to hold mental states such as desires, feelings percepts, knowledge, and beliefs. More recently, theory-of-mind investigations have extended to children's understanding of fictional mental states and mental process.Dream is one kind of fictional mental states, and dreaming is uncontrollable process. Children's conceptions of dreams have traditionally been taken as an index of their developing understanding of mind. The early studies abut children's understanding of dreams suggested that children achieved a mentalistic understanding of dreams only beginning at about 6 or 7. So Piaget claimed young children were realist. However, resent studies came to a very different conclusion. The researchers found that children as young as 3 or 4 years understood that dreams were immaterial, unavailable to public perception, and internal.These studies left us with a general sense that Piaget was wrong about children's understanding and that even young children's understanding of dreams were quit sensible and adultlike. Yet a number of important aspects of an adultlike understanding of dreams have not been explored systematically in children. One of these is the origins of dreams. A second unprobed aspect of children's understandings of dreams concerns the controllability of dreams.The purpose of this study was to reveal 3- to 9-year-olds' understanding of the mental nature, origins and controllability of dreams. 379 children aged 3 to 9 were interviewed and the results showed: Children as young as 4 or 5 years understood that dreams were immaterial, private, and fictional. 4- to 6-year-olds understood the roles of experience, knowledge in the origins of dream as adults did, but it's not available for preference. 4- to 6-year-olds didn't understand that dreaming could not be controlled. In contrast to 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds were better at realizing that dreaming was an uncontrollable process. However, children weren't very sure about dreams' uncontrollability even they aged 9.According to these results, we consider that young children aren't realists, and their beliefs that dreams are not controllable have significant developments during the elementary school years, along with development of their mental introspective skills.