What Do
Preschool Children Dream about?
Adrian Medina-Liberty is a
full-time professor in the Department of Psychology at the
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. He studied psychology and
has a PhD in symbolic anthropology. During the last ten years he
has been engaged on the study of the relationships between
culture, mind, and language.
Abstract
This paper can be inserted within
a sociocultural and narrative approach to dreams (Hunt, 1989,
States, 1993, Foulkes, 1999), and presents preliminary data about
the type and frequency of topics dreamt about by preschool
children. Preschool children’s dreams were examined and
interpreted according to the structuring interpretation method
(Medina-Liberty, 2005).
The
method consists in the interpretation of dream content on the
basis of three analytical levels: distal, mediate, and concurrent
meaning ordinates, which identify different interrelationships
orders between culture and dreams, that is, from more
socio-cultural situated to more personal‑subjective. This approach
is exemplified with preliminary data from 21 children attending to
a private middle-class preschool in Mexico City (ages 4 to 7)
whose average age was six years. Dreams were collected on a weekly
basis and were audio recorded. Concurrently, in-depth interviews
were conducted to gather information about children’s typical day,
family and school activities, favorite films and TV shows, gender
differences, if any, friends, frequency and type of games played,
etcetera. Through structurant interpretation analysis of several
children’s dreams, it is argued that dreams constitute a
subjective instantiation of culture’s ‘webs of meaning’ that
basically adopt a narrative organization.
Along
with Ricoeur (1991, 1994), meaning is considered as organized in
narratives. A narrative is a synthesis of multiple events or
manifold happenings that are transformed into a story. Narratives,
then, are more than a mere enumeration in a simple or successive
order of incidents or events. Narration organizes them into
intelligible wholes. Children dreams, likewise, are constructed
this way. Apparently dreams are but a series of unconnected
incidents but in fact they represent motifs, intentions, beliefs,
anxieties, and desires. It is proposed that these elements may
look incoherent for dreamers and researchers as well when they are
thought of as isolated fragments but if they are considered as
parts of a whole they appear as intelligible stories. Children
aren’t isolated individuals; from the very beginning they immerse
themselves into the culture that surrounds them. Data confirmed a
previous study that showed that several culture
expressions—notably media, school, and family—were appropriated by
children and constituted importantly their dreams content. In
children’s dreams these cultural elements were combined in novel
ways and produced original meanings.
References
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of
meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1996) The culture of
education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Foulkes, D. (1999) Children’s
dreaming and the development of consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Geertz, C. (1973/200) The
interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Hunt, H. (1989) The multiplicity
of dreams. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Medina-Liberty, A. (2002 June)
The cultural embodiment of mind. Paper presented at the 32nd
Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. Philadelphia, PA.
Medina-Liberty, A. (2004 July)
The fundamental role of symbols in the constitution of human mind.
Paper presented at the International Conference on Language,
Culture & Mind. Portsmouth, UK.
Medina-Liberty, A. (2005 June) A
sociocultural study of children’s dreams. Paper presented at the
23rd Annual Conference of the International Association for the
Study of Dreams. Berkeley, CA.
Ricoeur, P. (1991) Life: A story
in search of a narrator. In A Ricoeur reader. Reflection &
imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 425-440.
Ricoeur, P. (1994) The model of
the text: meaningful action considered as a text. In Hermeneutics
& the human sciences. Mass.: Cambridge University Press, pp.
197-221.
States, B. (1993) Dreaming and
storytelling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought
and language. Mass.: The M.I.T. Press.
Wertsch, J. (1998) Mind as
action. New York: Oxford University Press.
