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Children report dreams that are shorter and simpler than those of adults, and the more so the younger the child. But simplicity is double-sided: Studies of American children, for example, suggest that they dream more often than grownups about pleasurable objects such as toys, but they also have a greater mumber of frightening dreams involving aggression and weapons. Some psychologists think that this is because of the big violence - supply in TV, that children get to see every day.
Many authorities believe that fearful children\'s dreams reflect the precarious aspects of being smaller and less powerful than almost everyone else in an oversize world. Perhaps the most dramatic difference is that dream images of animals - including ferocious beasts - appear much more frequently to children than to adults. But youngsters also seem to dream more often about people they know and less about strangers than do grownups. Some studies indicate that girls have more pleasant dreams than boys - at least they experience less physical aggression in their dreams. Childhood dreams also differ from culture to culture, sometimes for no readily apparent reason. For example, one study of middle-class children in India found out that they tend to dream about food more often than do children in the United States, even though the Indian youngsters in the example were as well fed.
Animals appear in 39% of young children\'s dreams, a rate that falls to roughly 14% for teenagers and only 7,5% for college-age students, according to one study.
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