Aww, there's no more peaceful sight than a happily sleeping baby, but it could be a whole lot more peaceful than we originally thought. According to the psychologist David Foulkes, babies probably don't dream of anything. He reasons that dreams are largely based on the rich pool of experiences in our subconscious, but as babies have very few life experiences to draw on, and they sleep for such a lot of the time, They don't have much to go on. Stretching out the blurry images of a couple of toys and their parents' faces to a whole night of dreaming is a bit of a waste of resources when an infant's brain has so many other things to be getting on with. Babies still go into REM sleep, but neuroscientists reckon that it serves a completely different purpose in babies and young children. It is thought their brains are busy building the neural pathways that help us develop language, in the same way that baby birds learn their songs in their sleep. When children begin to develop spacial awareness and the ability to imagine rather than simply observe, around the age of 3, they begin to dream. Even then, Foulkes reckons that these dreams would be very simple, only developing into vivid, nocturnal adventures with structured narratives at the age of about 7.
