True dreaming, says Foulkes, a long-time investigator of children's dreams, starts between ages 7 and 9. The so-called dreams that children younger than that sometimes report at home probably arise in waking states, he asserts. A child awakens alone in the dark, say. This frightening experience may turn into a report of a "scary" dream.

Children's home dream reports also may reflect their desire to please parents. Eager to foster children's imagination, parents often ask leading questions. They also teach children to believe in the strangeness of dreams by describing an improbable morning report as "only a dream." Sleep laboratory studies, he says, shows most dreams are not bizarre.

Foulkes has directed two major studies of dreams in children from preschool to high school years. One study followed the same children as they grew up. The other compared different groups of children of different ages. For these studies, children spent a night in the sleep laboratory roughly once a month, and were awakened several times a night in both rapid eye movement sleep, or REM, the sleep state in which most dreaming occurs, and non-REM sleep. Laboratory studies, Foulkes says, provide a more meaningful sample of dream activity than morning after reports collected at home. Both studies produced the same results.

Foulkes originally published his findings in what he describes as "one formidable book" and technical journal articles, perhaps accounting for their relative obscurity. In this conversationally written book, he seeks a wider general audience.

In the laboratory, Foulkes says, children report dreams very matter-of-factly: "such-and-such was my dream, no big deal." In the 3- to 5-year-olds, he reports, the single most amazing finding was how puny the dream process turned out to be. When awakened in REM sleep and asked about dreams, children of these ages typically report they were not dreaming at all. Young children sometimes mention an animal, such as a bird singing, or a body state, such as feeling sleepy, but they lack the ability to tell stories.

Freud's patient, the "Wolf Man," reported dreaming at age 4 of seeing white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud concluded the man must have seen his parents having sexual intercourse. Foulkes' studies suggest children of that age lack the capacity to imagine activity: not just sexual activity, any activity. They relate only to the here-and-now.

Starting at about age 5, dreams may concern simple events. Not until around age 7 do children start showing up as active participants in their own dreams. School and television, despite their heavy presence in children's waking lives, don't figure prominently in their dreams. Play is the central theme, and generally involves positive relations with people or objects.

Around ages 11 to 13, dream content starts to reflect the traits and personal style of the dreamer. Assertive children dream of an active self, competitive children of self-initiated aggression, and those who display hostility, of anger. Dreams at this age are as long as adult dreams collected in the laboratory. Older teenagers become increasingly able to stand back, to observe themselves as actors doing things in their dreams. This constitutes evidence, Foulkes suggests, of further mental maturation.