http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/ en Copyright 2007 Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:44:33 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister. `Wake up, Alice dear!' said her sister; `Why, what a long sleep you've had!' `Oh, I've had such a curious dream!' said Alice. -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Discussions of dreams and dream theories rarely focus on children despite the fact that studies have shown that a child’s dream can offer potentially valuable insights into a child’s cognitive as well as emotional development. Dream theories presented by David Foulkes in Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness demonstrate how a child’s dreaming process is indicative of a child’s cognitive development. Meanwhile, Ernest Hartmann’s dream theories in Dreams and Nightmares: The Origins and Meanings of Dreams show that dreams can be viewed as an imaginary space for expression of emotions. A deeper understanding of dreams, especially in terms of how they can be a sort of invented space to act out emotions, allows us to understand an author’s intent for using dreams in children’s books such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland or J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; in these books, not only are dreams a useful literary device, but they also help shape the literature itself into an imaginary space for the expression or exploration of emotions. For example, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Wonderland is a dream, but it is also a world where there are no rules; in addition, events that would normally frighten or confuse a child become ridiculous and laughable. In Carroll’s Wonderland, a child can enjoy being a child. ]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/post.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/post.html Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:44:33 +0000 There appears to be no solitary explanation for dreams. However, it seems the various explanations of dreams can generally be categorized into two approaches: psychoanalytic or cognitive. Dream theorists from both approaches focus their discussions on the dreams of adults; this page will be examining children’s dreams. A. Psychoanalytic Approach: A psychoanalytic approach to dreams places emphasis on the interpretation of the dream. Psychoanalytic dream theorists might disagree in terms of how to interpret dreams, but the majority of them believe that dreams have meanings that should be examined. The typical attitude of psychoanalysis towards children is an alarming one. Psychoanalysts seem to carry the belief that children are filled with violent, often sexual, urges almost from the moment of birth. An example of this attitude can be witnessed in The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. Although Bettelheim’s overall goal for the book is to discuss the positive influence of fairy tales on children, he spends a fair portion of the book focusing on a child’s “oedipal complex”, or the belief that children often have the wish to kill or hurt the parent of the same gender so that they may sleep with the parent of the opposite one. The idea of oedipal complexes does not receive as much attention today as it did while Bettelheim was writing, but it does demonstrate the violent emotions that psychoanalysts assign to children. These emotions extend into dreams. In What Do Children Dream?, Gerard Bleandonu, a former head of child psychiatry at a regional hospital in France and whose practice is based on psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, notes that psychoanalysts do “attribute complicated and violent emotions to young children.” (Bleandonu 49) Bleandonu dedicates many pages to the dreams he collected from the child patients he worked with. In the majority of these dreams, Bleandonu believed the dream revealed that the child was disturbed by some violent or sexual emotion. B. Cognitive Approach: A cognitive approach to dreams generally gives little attention to the interpretation of dreams; instead, cognitive dream theorists explain the process of dreaming through the biology of the brain. David Foulkes is a cognitive dream theorist who, during the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, conducted an organized dream study that focuses solely on children’s dreams. In his book, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness, Foulkes describes in extensive detail the dream experiments that he conducted on children between the ages of three and fourteen. Based on the results of his experiments, he concludes that a child’s dreaming process is closely connected with their level of cognitive development. As he puts it, “To dream, it isn’t enough to be able to see. You have to be able to think in a certain way.” (Foulkes 117) Therefore, for instance, a child is not able to represent himself or herself in a dream until around seven-years-old because it takes a certain amount of savvy with visual-spatial skills to dream at that level. As a cognitive scientist, Foulkes does not spend much time discussing the importance of emotions in dreams. In fact, Foulkes is dismissive of emotions in children’s dreams; he refutes the idea that “dreams [are] dripping with feelings” (Foulkes 68) and sardonically credits the idea to “psychiatry’s century-long infatuation with psychoanalysis” (Foulkes 68). C. Ernest Hartmann: Somewhere in between the violent emotions of a typical psychoanalyst’s interpretation of a child’s dreams and Foulkes, who believes that children’s dreams do not demonstrate any emotions, is Ernest Hartmann. Hartmann, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and author of Dreams and Nightmares: The Origins and Meanings of Dreams, points out that Every two- to five- year-old child who is just developing the cognitive structures to realize who is who, who’s safe and who’s unsafe or unpredictable, and to realize how relatively powerful all the adults are, is bound to have some of this sense of vulnerability. (Hartmann 65) Hartmann theorizes that dreams are emotionally based; they are also a safe space for a person to act out emotions, especially for victims of trauma. He is not a child psychologist nor does he claim to have personally worked with children, but his theories allow for an emotional element in the discussion of children’s dreams without claiming that children are inherently violent. ]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/two_approaches_to_childrens_dr.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/two_approaches_to_childrens_dr.html Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:01:37 +0000 Children’s literature is a nebulous category of literature with a complex history. For anyone who wishes to read a more comprehensive and detailed history of children’s literature, please visit http://www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/bibs/childhis.html. However, for the purposes of this project, it might be interesting to know only a few relevant historical points in children’s literature: 1. For many years, the realm of children’s literature often was a sort of dumping ground for literature that adults felt they had outgrown, such as myths, folklores and fairy tales; these stories slowly became regarded as fantastical or outdated and, as a result, only suitable for children to read. 2. Prior to Victorian-era England, very few stories were created specifically for children. Literature that was written for children had a tendency to be highly religious in tone and didactic in message. Examples of this type of text would be the British moral verses, such as “Table Rules for Little Folks” or Eliza Cook’s “The Mouse and the Cake”; these stories share the common theme that when a child misbehaves, it is equivalent to a child committing a sin. From the United States, The New England Primer is also a good example of religious texts developed for children. 3. The Victorian period is credited as the era where a major shift took place in the purpose of children’s literature; the Victorians were not the first to attempt this change, but they did the most in terms of quantity of books written. During this time, many books were created which did not contain moral or religious messages. Stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Edward Lear’s nonsense verses and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan were revolutionary in the sense that they were written for a child’s pleasure and not for the purposes of discipline.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/history_of_childrens_literatur.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/history_of_childrens_literatur.html Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:18:07 +0000 Alice in Wonderland reminds us that childhood is simultaneously wonderful and scary. It’s a period of time associated with play, innocence, and minimal responsibilities. It’s also a period of time when the world can be an especially confusing and dangerous place. Ideally, a child is able to enjoy the wonderful aspects of childhood without feeling completely vulnerable and helpless when faced with the scary aspects. In this story, Lewis Carroll asks us to follow the whimsical adventures of Alice after she decides to follow the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole into another world. The story is told from Alice’s point of view, which allows Carroll to show the delight that children experience when discovering new things. For instance, at one point, Alice is given instructions to eat some cake; she eats it in the hopes she will grow back to her normal size after having been miniaturized by a potion she drank earlier. When she remains the same size, the reader is told, To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. (Carroll 12) Alice seems to be more in curious anticipation of what will happen next than fearful; her primary emotion seems to be disappointment when nothing happens to her after she eats the cake. By this time, Alice thinks it is “common” that she is a miniature version of herself, which perhaps hints at children’s ability to adapt to new situations no matter how unusual they may be. Through Alice, Carroll demonstrates that children are intelligent, curious beings with certain logic patterns of their own. Carroll’s use of dreams is where he shows how sensitively he has considered this story from a child’s perspective. Wonderland is a dream-like place where, as the perpetually grinning Cheshire-cat points out, everyone is “mad” (Carroll 51). At face value, Carroll’s story is delightfully insane – it’s a place where frogs can be doormen and the aforementioned Cheshire-Cat, who, in addition to his grinning, can reappear and disappear at will; it’s a world where Alice can change size just by eating and drinking different items. Yet, despite the fact that dreams throw the world of Wonderland into chaos, it also presents a sense of safety in the book. In Alice in Wonderland, dreams are a method used to remove reality from a situation. In her article, “Fairy Tales for Pleasure”, Gillian Avery states, By treating the world of lessons and governesses with such playfulness, Lewis Carroll reduces it from the terrifying place it must sometimes have seemed to a manageable absurdity. (Carroll 326) Although she makes this observation while discussing a scene in Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, the idea of “manageable absurdity” can easily be applied to Alice in Wonderland, such as a scene where a Dodo bird and various animals are running a race in circles and everyone wins a prize because everyone has won the race. The confusing rules of an adult world are reduced to silliness. Also, Carroll uses dreams to remove Alice as well as the reader from a situation when it threatens to become too dangerous. At the end of the novel, an angry Queen of Hearts orders a group of playing cards to attack Alice, but before the situation becomes too frightening for Alice or the reader following her, Carroll wakes her up and prevents the scene from going any further. By doing so, Carroll has allowed the book to become a substitute imaginary space for dreams. What Hartmann claims dreams expresses, Carroll has expressed in the space of a book.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/alice_in_wonderland_1.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/alice_in_wonderland_1.html Fri, 20 Apr 2007 23:02:06 +0000 As adults who have supposedly attained a certain level of maturity, time has put some distance between us and our own rites of passage (thankfully). However, as a result of that distance, adults sometimes forget the difficulties and the confusion a child faces during the process of “growing up”. The ability to consider the world from a child’s perspective is not easy, especially after we have congratulated ourselves for successfully passing that stage of our lives, but the need to connect with our children drives us to find ways. Dreams as well as children’s literature, such as Alice in Wonderland, are potential tools that can help us. In Dreams and Nightmares, Ernest Hartmann theorizes that a dream is a space to express emotions; for children, dreams provide an opportunity to digest the confusion and vulnerability they might feel about the world of adults. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland potentially acts as a surrogate dream space for the child. The dream-like elements of Wonderland make it a chaotic place where Alice encounters curious as well as unpleasant events. However, the dream-like elements of Wonderland also provide a sense of safety for the reader following Alice in her adventures. In her article, “Fairy Tales for Pleasure”, Gillian Anderson observes that Carroll uses the nonsense of Wonderland to reduce feelings of confusion and fear to a state of “manageable absurdity”. In Alice in Wonderland, as in dreams, a child is able to safely face the fears he or she might feel about the adult world; in Wonderland, dreams protect the child and possibly reveal a way to cope with the more complex world of adulthood.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/some_final_thoughts_1.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/some_final_thoughts_1.html Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:28:22 +0000 Suggested Readings: Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Bleandonu, Gerard. What do children dream? London: Free Association Books, 2006. Damrosch, David et al., eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2. New York: Pearson Education, 2006. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Foulkes, David. Children’s Dreams and the Development of Consciousness. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. Hartmann, Ernest. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origins and Meanings of Dreams. Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 2001. Ratey, John J. A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Helpful Links: http://www.southernct.edu/~brownm/300decon.html http://www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/bibs/childhis.html Image Credits: A. The John Tenniel Alice in Wonderland drawings used on this webpage were obtained from the following sites: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-table.html http://www.sirmuse.com/AliceCardsDrop.gif www.ebbemunk.dk B. The Disney Alice in Wonderland frameshots used on this webpage were obtained from the following sites: http://www.dvdclassicscorner.net/images/AliceinWonderland-masterpieceedition.jpg http://img118.exs.cx/img118/6702/cheshire.jpg http://www.lancasterplayhouse.com/Alice-WebLogo.jpg C. Anne Geddes Image was taken from: http://www.andrea-schroeder.com/AGeddes9.html ]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/suggested_readings_1.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/suggested_readings_1.html Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:28:47 +0000 Hi, my name is Caroline Yu. I will be graduating this summer from Queens College with a degree in English literature. Currently, I am applying to master's programs in the New York City area. Children's literature is a fascinating topic and I'm hoping I will be able to study it further. Thank you for visiting this web page.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/about_the_author.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/dreams/cyu/2007/04/about_the_author.html Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:29:09 +0000