That increase was especially striking among girls of 16 and over, who were generally frightened by animals and strange men and women.
When school life played a part in children’s dreams it was more frequently the playgrounds than the classrooms which were visualized.
The war affected boys’ more than girls’ dreams. The dreaming boy was a valorous fighter, mentioned in dispatches, rewarded with the Victoria Cross, thanked personally by the King; or he returned home wildly cheered by crowds.
Girls, thirteen or over, saw themselves as Red Cross nurses, but no such dreams were observed in girls below ten.
Normal, healthy children delighted in dreaming and telling their dreams with a wealth of detail.
Dr. Kimmins mentioned that, while the dreams of school children were generally easy to interpret, the dreams of students from 18 to 22 “were so heavily camouflaged that it would be impossible for any one who was not a trained expert in psychoanalysis to deal with them satisfactorily.”
We can see how the repression made necessary by life conditions in modern communities slowly but surely transforms the obvious wish-fulfilment dreams of children into the symbolical and often distressing visions of the adult. The development of sexuality in boys and girls and the repression to which it is submitted explains easily the proportion of fear dreams in girls and boys.
Sexual talk and sexual curiosity are more common among boys than girls and therefore occupy the boys’ minds more constantly than the girls’ minds. On the other hand, many of the boys above sixteen find forms of sexual satisfaction of which the girls of the same age are deprived. Fear dreams are therefore more frequent among growing girls, being simply a symbolical form of sexual gratification.
The dreams of adults are far from being as uniformly pleasurable as those of young and healthy children.
A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant.