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Children’s Dreaming: A Study Based on Questionnaires Completed by Parents
Claudio Colace, Ph.D.
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.
| Keywords: Children’s dreams, dreaming, dream content, dream bizarreness |
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