The Unknowable Enigma of Babies’ Dreams

The Unknowable Enigma of Babies’ Dreams

by Alia Wong

Infants spend most of their time sleeping, waking up for just a few hours total every day. A lot of growth happens during those spans of shut-eye, though. Research shows that sleep is just as formative for babies’ development as are the scattered bouts of consciousness when their eyes are open and their ears are perked up. As with adults, sleeping likely helps infants retain or protect memory and learn language; some evidence also suggests it promotes healthy physical growth. Technological advances are helping to shed more and more insight on, as the University of Washington professor of early-childhood learning Patricia Kuhl has put it, “the infinite number of secrets” contained in babies’ brains.

One secret that those advances have yet to uncover: whether babies dream—and, if they do, what they dream about. “Getting inside the head of a baby,” wrote the science journalist Angela Saini in a 2013 piece for The Guardian, “is like deciphering the thoughts of a kitten.” Brains are composed of so many intangible phenomena, and the technologies used to measure the stuff that is tangible (like brain-scanning machines) are difficult to use on babies. The resulting mystery has made the topic an endless source of intrigue—and of pointed disagreement— among many researchers.

The Unknowable Enigma of Babies’ Dreams

by Alia Wong

https://www.livescience.com/33702-babies...sleep.html


"Newborns spend half their sleep time in REM, accompanied by jerking eyeballs, twitching bodies and a characteristic saw-toothed pattern on brain scans. For comparison, adults spend just one quarter of their sleeping time in REM and the rest in the dreamless non-REM phase, marked by slowly varying brain waves. If babies did dream during REM, then they would dream for the equivalent of a full eight-hour workday. That would be a lot of mileage to get out of the few images they've collected of their bedroom, toys and parents' faces."



https://www.quora.com/What-do-babies-dream-about

"Also the child may also experience symbiotically the emotional states of the mother as well as the hormonal activities of the body of the mother. Thus they may have the ability to experience love, hate, pain and other aspects of their parent.

All of this data will contribute to the data required for the baby to dream."

https://www.livescience.com/33702-babies...sleep.html


"Newborns spend half their sleep time in REM, accompanied by jerking eyeballs, twitching bodies and a characteristic saw-toothed pattern on brain scans. For comparison, adults spend just one quarter of their sleeping time in REM and the rest in the dreamless non-REM phase, marked by slowly varying brain waves. If babies did dream during REM, then they would dream for the equivalent of a full eight-hour workday. That would be a lot of mileage to get out of the few images they've collected of their bedroom, toys and parents' faces."



https://www.quora.com/What-do-babies-dream-about

"Also the child may also experience symbiotically the emotional states of the mother as well as the hormonal activities of the body of the mother. Thus they may have the ability to experience love, hate, pain and other aspects of their parent.

All of this data will contribute to the data required for the baby to dream."

Cool stuff! On the connection between mothers and babies, there was a program in Korea talking about "expectancy dreams" - basically dreams signaling the woman was pregnant but also at times signaling the number of children they would have & IIRC some of the child's temperament upon being born.

Of course these researchers wouldn't remotely consider it, but I think it is likely that some newborns' dreams are of their most recent past lives, especially if their previous life ending was traumatic.

Ian Stevenson's research mainly in India and the Far East found numerous cases of very young children of 2-3 years or so spontaneously remembering what the evidence indicated were recent past lives, usually where the death of the previous personality was traumatic, by stabbing, gunshot, car accident, etc. Stevenson and his colleagues were able to verify many of the elements of these memories, and they couldn't be explained by any normally accepted mechanism. Usually the memories seem to dissipate by the age of 7 or so. 

This research indicates that newborns apparently come into the world with past life memories, and sometimes these memories emerge into their consciousness and are expressed verbally as soon as the baby can talk. Why shouldn't these powerful recollections sometimes also show up in dreams at very early age? It would seem to explain the REM activity and other signs that the babies are apparently experiencing what adults experience as dreams. Certainly with adults traumatic experiences often can be dreamed about in nightmares.

Of course these researchers wouldn't remotely consider it, but I think it is likely that some newborns' dreams are of their most recent past lives, especially if their previous life ending was traumatic.

Also, and perhaps more so, those who did not have a sudden or traumatic ending to a previous life, dreaming may be of the between-life stage, perhaps remaining in a two-way exchange with that reality during those early months and years.

The Stevenson category of research in one respect may give a misleading viewpoint. Focussing on early-childhood past-life memories has been justified on the grounds that it reduces/eliminates the possibility of having acquired information by conventional means. On the other hand, the cases as you mentioned are representative of a small subsection - often with traumatic memories. What of the others, comprising the larger proportion, we might ask ourselves.