Parents look on at their sleeping newborn and speculate about what could be occupying his dreams. Is it the bottle that will greet him when he awakes or maybe the lullaby that drove him to sleep. But could it be that babies don’t dream at all?

While babies experience REM, or rapid eye movement sleep phase, more often than adults, averaging half of the time asleep in REM, David Foulkes, an expert on pediatric dreaming, observed that babies may not actually have the ability to dream at all. Adults spend a quarter of their time sleeping in REM, the sleep phase where dreams occur. Neuroscientists speculate that the role of REM in babies is not to induce dreams, but rather gives the brain the opportunity to create pathways, therefore developing language and expanding the child’s knowledge. Since the brain is actively working to grow, there is little room for dreams to form.

While asleep, humans cycle in and out of two sleep phases, REM and non-REM. The non-REM stage allows  the human body to repair itself and strengthen the immune system while the REM stage is a more restless sleep phase and the stage where dreams occur. One explanation as to why babies awake frequently in the night is because of the large length of time spent in REM. Although babies spend majority of their night in REM, it is speculated that their body spends all the time furthering its development during both REM and non-REM stages and none of the time dreaming. But no one can say for sure whether or not babies dream due to their inability to speak and the lack of technology to experience what is happening in another person’s mind.

The question of whether babies dream during the night has long been a controversial topic brought up among researchers. Those that say babies can not dream argue that the dreams we experience involve characters, dialogue, drama, and a plot line, which babies’ brains are not quite equipped to create dreams similar to ours. Our dreams can be past experiences we have been through or events that we have heard about or witnessed throughout the day. New neural pathways in the brain are created during a baby’s time asleep, therefore it would be difficult to experience dreaming until the child is much older and has more life experiences.

Although babies may have the ability to perceive reality, they do not have enough life experiences or maturity to dream for the first few years of life. Dreaming is thought to be a cognitive process that comes to children in early childhood. Foulkes found that 4 or 5 year olds describe dreams with limited characters, plots and memories. Vivid dreams typically occur around the age of 7 or 8 years old.

A study was done proving babies can learn during sleep time. Music was played for fifteen minutes while the child slept and when the music stopped, air was blown onto the child’s face. When the experiment was repeated, the child tightened their eyelids following the completion of the song in preparation of the gust of air. This experiment supports Foulkes claim that a child’s brain is too busy learning and developing during sleep that they are unable to dream.

But Foulkes studies were simply speculations and could not actually test the child to find out whether dreams occur.

Other researchers claim that the REM phase children endure for majority of their sleep occupies dreams on sensations experienced in the womb. Since it is known that babies spend majority of the time in the REM sleep phase, researchers argue that babies would have the ability to dream and therefore must do so.

Associate director of the Sleep Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Jodi Mindell argues that while a baby may experience dreaming, they differ from the dreams we have as they are silent and only contain imagery. She eliminates nightmares from possibly occupying a baby’s night because fears do not develop in children until around the age of 2.
It is hard to determine whether babies are capable of dreaming while asleep from the data I have gathered. The topic is hard to study due to the nature of dreams and limited technology available to look inside someone’s mind. Scientists can only really speculate about what the answer may be. The future may hold the definite answer but for now we are left to not only keep guessing about what may be in a baby’s dream but also whether or not dreams are actually happening.