David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children's dreaming, and a pioneer of the use of sleep labs research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it - active stories in which the dreamer is an actor - appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9.

Although younger children do report dreams (often at the prompting of their eager parents), careful empirical study suggests that what the child calls dreams are almost certainly waking fantasies and confabulations. Laboratory studies show that preschoolers' REM sleep dreams usually consist of isolated static images - often of animals. Foulkes argues that the late development of narrative dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.