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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

I would like to know what small children (1-2 years) dream, but we can of course never really know for sure. My daughter (2 years) definitely seems to have nightmares. She also seems to have conversations in her dreams, as she often speaks answers to questions while sleeping. Personally I very strongly remember some wild dreams when I was very young, probably around the age I started remembering things at all, so around 2,5 years. These dreams were often synesthesic, I could see sounds in extremely saturated, moving, three-dimensional colors, and could "taste" geometric forms like pyramids and cuboids. I have never taken LSD, but I imagine the experience to be quite similar. The closest (but not very close) thing I have seen to these dreams is the stargate sequence in 2001.

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This website is actually part of a bigger one called DreamResearch.net where you can find interesting info such as some investigations into what children dream.

It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7, which might explain your dreams being so crazy and full of colors, as in those ages you are still developing "the ability to produce mental imagery" and "narrative skills".

https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2020b.pdf - Chapter "Dreaming Is a Gradual Cognitive Achievement"

> It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7

But seeing cats and dogs dreaming is fairly common.

I would really like to know what my dog dreams. Whatever it is, it sounds like he has a far more active life when asleep than when awake.

Chasing squirrels

I had the same horror dream from about 2 years old to 12. It repeated before sleep walking or when I had fever. It brought the same feelings and had the same motifs every time, and it was looping (I'd get massively scared and the dream would restart and the same sequence of events, quite long, would get to the end again). Sometimes I would get to explore a new motif in more details but this would happen after several repeats of the same old horror.

Characters and scenes looked a bit like they were out of a Disney movie (Aladdin, Pinocchio, I remember the guards from Aladdin and the princess/fairy from Pinocchio), which I guess I watched a lot when I was young.

I remember a few vivid dreams from around kindergarten. One even had music that, I kid you not, I remember to this day. My working theory is that I actually heard that music somewhere and the dream just cemented it in my memory.

My daughter (2) sleep talks "more milkies"

Food, scary animals, saying "I don't want", asking where something/someone is. (My daughter, 3.)

Synesthesia is incredible. You haven't lived to the fullest until you felt colors as emotions and emotions as geometric shapes.

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