The Dreams of a Child

Claudio Colace, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychotherapist at the Operational Unit of Psychology of the ASL Viterbo (National Health Service Office, Italy), where he works at the Outpatient Psychology Department and at the Center for Drug Addictions of Civita Castellana (Viterbo). He obtained an M.D. in Psychology at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", a post-graduate Master in Neurophysiology of Consciousness State, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a Ph.D. in Psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna, Italy. He is the author of scientific contributions published in The American Journal on Addictions, Neuropsychoanalysis, Alcohol and Drug Review, Sleep and Hypnosis, Sleep and Sleep Research. He is the author of Children’s Dreams: From Freud’s Observations to Modern Dream Research (London, 2010, Karnac Books); Drug Dreams: Clinical and Research Implications of Dreams about Drugs in Drug-addicted Patients (London, 2014, Karnac Books); and of some Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences entries: "Dream", "Latent Dream Content" and "Manifest Dream Contents" (eds. V. Zeigler-Hill and T. Shackelford, Springer International Publisher, 2018).

Introduction Part 1: Methodological aspects of the study 1. The credibility of children's dream reports 2. The methodology of this study Part 2: The debut of dreaming activity: infantile dreams (ages four to five) 3. The predominance of clear wish-fulfilment dreams 4. Nature of the wishes appearing in dream reports 5. Daytime sources and triggering conditions of clear wish-fulfilment dreams 6. How do dreams act? The modus operandi of clear wish-fulfilment dreams 7. Less common forms of dreaming in infancy Part 3: The decline of infantile forms of dreaming (ages six to seven) 8. Changes in dream repertoire and developments in wish-fulfilment dreaming 9. Development of dream bizarreness and dream-work operations 10. Bad dreams 11. Ego and super-ego development and changes in dreaming Part 4: Dreaming in middle childhood (ages eight to ten) 12. Changes in dream repertoire and developments in wish-fulfilment dreams at ages 8-10 13. Dream distortion and new dream-works operations 14. Changes in bad dreams Part 5: The meaning and function of infantile dreams 15. The function of dreams: the affective-reestablishment (AR) hypothesis 16. Infantile forms of dreaming in adults 17. A new ontogenetic psychological-psychoanalytic model of dream Conclusions