Q. Do babies dream?
A. "Yes, as far as we can tell," said Dr. Charles P. Pollak, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in New York.
Most dreaming occurs during a type of sleep called REM sleep, for rapid eye movement, which Dr. Pollak explains is "an evolutionarily old type of sleep that occurs at all life stages, including infancy, and even before infancy, in fetal life."
There is no question that newborn infants have REM sleep, he said, and the rapid eye movements can be observed as they sleep. The two eyes move together, mostly side to side, but sometimes up and down.
It is a well-based inference that babies are dreaming in REM sleep, he said.
As for the content of any dreams, Dr. Pollak said: "That is like asking whether your pet dog or cat is dreaming, because they can't communicate, and you can't ask. We presume that infants dream infantile things, but we don't really know what it is that they dream."
"There is some evidence in adults that the direction of eye movement corresponds in a crude way to the content of the dream," Dr. Pollak continued.
"If they are dreaming about walking in a field," he said, "the movement is most likely horizontal. If they dream of looking up at a building or climbing stairs, vertical eye movement is more likely to predominate. We can't go further than that." C. CLAIBORNE RAYContinue reading the main story