CHILDREN'S DREAMS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXIX, Issue 9654, 10 July 1919, Page 3

CHILDREN'S DREAMS.

™$ C cW'^ Kimnuns ' speaking O n The Significance of Children's Dreams " at the Child Study Society in London recently, said that through the assistance of London school teache?~™n , been«ble to obtain records of 0000 dreams. The commonest dreams were the fulfilled wish, tho fear, the lairy tale, the purely domestic, and the air-raid dreams. The fulfilled wish bulked more largely than any other element, and the most frequent form that the fulfilled wish took was Ehafof the return of father or brother from war. In very young children the fear dream was very prominent, but the ghost dream had passed. Children dreamed of an objectionable man tr- enerally a German. °

At seven years -burglars appeared very frequently in dreams. School-acti-vities were dreamed of at the rate of only 1 per cent. Children in poor districts dreamed of toys more often than rich children did. The frequency with which London children dreamed that they were,in the country were pathetic' Air-raid dreams, he was thankful to say, occurred now .at the low rate of about 4 per cent. ■ The five-year-old child was always the centre of his own dreams, and nothing could take him rrom his chief part. For instance, a little boy wrote, "i dreamed' a man shot another boy after he had killed me."

A little girl at Peckham dreamed the night after the Royal visit that "A lady came and sat on my bed, but the King and Queen were under my bed and they were eating bread and but^ ter." A boy declared that he dreamed his mother took him out of his bath and put him through the mangle and then hung him out on the clothes-line to dry. When she began to iron him theiron was so hot that he woke up.