Do babies dream? This is an age-old question with a complex answer. Even the youngest babies can be very active in their sleep, making some pretty funny noises or faces. When you see a sleeping baby twitch, smile or grin, you might think they’ve drifted off into a dream world, perhaps floating in a rainbow sky or playing with the family dog.
In truth, scientists still don’t know much about the baby’s brain. Here, experts in human development and neuroscience break down what they know about whether babies dream and what happens in babies’ brains while they sleep.
Do babies dream when they sleep?
The short answer is, we can’t say one way or the other.
“Right now, with our technology, it doesn’t seem possible to know the answer to the question of whether babies dream or not,” said Dr. Melissa Burnham, a professor and chair of the Department of Human Development, Family Science and Counseling at the University of Nevada, Reno.
That’s because the only way we know that anyone dreams is that they can talk about their experiences. So, until a child is old enough to wake up and tell you, “I saw the craziest thing in my dream,” we can only wonder.
What we do know is that sleeping babies’ brains are very busy. As they sleep, research shows they consolidate memories of things they experienced while awake and may even be processing stimuli in their environment. That’s why sleep is so important for a baby’s development.
Furthermore, a baby’s brain works differently than an adult’s or older child’s brain, even during the day. Although they can store memories, they don’t develop “episodic” memories — or, memories of specific events — until age 3 or 4. If babies see images or sounds in their sleep, “it’s probably not the same as what we imagine in a dream,” says Burnham.
How do babies’ sleep cycles differ from adults?
As new parents know, newborns can nod off in the sunshine and be ready to party at 2am. That’s because they weren’t born with a circadian rhythm — the natural internal cycles that signal our bodies when it’s time to sleep. This function must be developed in the first few months of life.
When adults fall asleep, we go through two stages of sleep: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is associated with vivid dreams. A full sleep cycle involves going through all of these states, and a typical night can consist of four to six sleep cycles, each lasting an average of 90 minutes.
Newborns, on the other hand, snooze 16 to 18 hours per 24-hour period, broken up into short chunks of time. According to existing research, a given sleep session for a newborn consists of only one or two sleep cycles. In these stages, they can go through several stages:
- Active sleep.
- Quiet sleep.
- Uncertain sleep.
How can you tell which stage of sleep a baby is in? If you’re watching your baby sleep and you notice their breathing becoming irregular, their eyes moving and their hands shaking, “that’s active sleep,” says Burnham.
When they become quiet and still, they tend to move into the “quiet sleep” stage. If an infant does not exhibit specific behaviors characteristic of active or quiet sleep, they are in “uncertain sleep.”
When do babies start dreaming?
Experts don’t know at what exact age people start developing dreams, but you may hear children start describing them starting between 2 and 3 years old, Burnham says. Sometimes, the first dreams that children and parents talk about are bad dreams.
“Young children as young as three will often start having scary dreams,” Burnham explains. “It’s usually about something unseen or something they saw during the day revisiting them…something their brain is doing.”
What do babies’ sleep sounds and movements mean if they’re not dreaming?
Babies are very active in their sleep — they usually move more often than adults or older children. Why do they do this, if not because of the dream? That’s a question that some researchers find more compelling than if they were dreaming.
“Babies have more REM (or active) sleep than adults, and one of the features of REM sleep is twitching of the legs, eyes, face, etc.,” says Mark Blumberg , a neuroscientist and chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa. He and other researchers theorize that twitching during sleep may help babies’ brains develop.
“Twitches are produced in the brainstem, and the sensory feedback arising from the movements flows through the sensorimotor system, ultimately activating neurons in the cortex,” explains Blumberg. Instead of twitching as a result of dreams, he added, “I believe that dreams are more often the consequences of these movements than their purpose.”
This is because the sensations that come from the twitches can specifically activate areas of the brain that external stimulation cannot. Blumberg adds that these self-generated movements, or twitches, help build precise and functionally complete brain circuits.
The bottom line
Whether babies dream or not, their brains do a lot of hard work while they snore. Children of all ages need more sleep than the average adult. Most babies don’t sleep through the night until they are at least 4-6 months old, and many continue to wake at night well beyond that age. So, while we may be left to wonder what is actually going on in their minds, there is no question that whatever it is, it helps them grow and develop.
