It is difficult to know, because newborns obviously cannot tell us, and neuroimaging techniques also do not establish what exactly goes through their little heads during the time they spend sleeping, between sixteen and eighteen hours a day.
What we do know is that 50% of their rest enters the so-called REM phase , while for adults this stage – the most dreamlike and intense from the point of view of brain activity – only occupies 25%. So mental maturation would, in theory, mean less dreaming.
The only clues about what babies feel when they are in Morpheus arms are their gestures: they move their eyebrows, they pout … and they smile a lot. This suggests that nightmares come later, after two or three years , when anguish and emotional conflicts are installed in the child's psyche.
