Abstract Mkid 153

Objective: This paper reports an investigation on children’s dreaming based on questionnaires completed by parents. The purpose of the study was to collect data on a large group of subjects and evaluate their consistency compared to the traditional studies on children’s dreams (i.e., REM dreams, home-collected dreams and schoolcollected dreams). Method: The questionnaire (QSEE) used mainly considers questions about parents compliance with dreams and questions about children’s dreaming, particularly the last dreams they have had. The study was conducted in different schools of Center- North Italy. 1148 questionnaires were distributed to parents, 652 of these were returned to the experimenter (return rate = 57%) and 565 were usable (usability rate = 49%). The 565 questionnaires involved 565 children (255 female, 310 male) aged between 2 years;9 months and 9 years;4 months. Results and Conclusions: The questionnaire employed has proved to be useful in collecting data on several aspect of children’s dreaming in a relatively simple and costeffective way. Furthermore, the indications obtained on child dreaming matched with several data from studies that adopted more conventional dream collection methods. A large part of well-established knowledge about children’s dreams (e.g., short length, presence of animal characters and so on) was supported by the use of a large sample of children/dreams, that allow for a more certain generalization. The use of questionnaires of this kind may stand side by side with conventional methodologies allowing a valid opportunity of cross-checking their results.