From the age of about 4 up until about 10 I had a recurring dream that I could mostly bring about at will but it got harder the older I got. I would start by lying ready in bed on my back ready to fall asleep and eventually I would start to feel as if I was bouncing on my bed and I got higher and higher and it felt as if I was on a rollercoaster. It was so real that as a child I thought I actually was bouncing, once I opened my eyes to make sure I didnt hit the roof and the bouncing came to an apbrupt stop.

The dream associated with the bouncing eventually led to me feeling as if I'd been bounced to an incredibly high point, then I'd start free falling. In the dream I was some sort of christmas elf that fell and hit giant toys on my way down (with no feeling or fear of pain) until eventually I landed on a giant drum and that's all I can recollect at this age. As I got older it got harder and harder to start the bouncing feeling that I so enjoyed, I remember figuringout that it was linked to my breathing and I had to hold my breathe for an impossible amount of time to start the bouncing up again. As I got older I just couldnt hold my breath for the required time and the skill became lost in time. strange that it just happened to me as a child but as I got older I needed to hold my breath.

So any insight onto the power of a childs dream? Possibly how I could regain that extraordinary feeling of bouncing to incredulous heights?

It's a well known fact that the younger you are, the more time you spend in REM sleep (correlated with dreaming.)

Newborn babies, for example, sleep about 16 hours a day and spend half of that time in REM sleep. Fetuses in the womb during the third trimester of pregnancy have the most REM sleep of all.

As you get older, your total amount of sleep decreases and within that, the percentage of your sleep that is REM sleep decreases.

Various theories about why we dream try to explain the reason for this. They basically revolve around the idea that the younger you are the more you have to learn, the more neural connections you have to develop and the more long-term memories you have to create.

Some theories that discuss this are

The theory that dreaming is a state of "Protoconsciousness"

The Continual Activation Theory of Dreams which says that we develop our long-term memories during REM sleep.

The Reverse Learning Theory of Dreams which says that when we dream we get rid of unnecessary neural connections so the brain doesn't become overloaded. The younger you are, the more neural connections are creating, so the more neural connections you need to discard.


As you get older, the content of your dreams change because instead of just having to learn about "everything" you are involved with the stresses of day to day life and your dreams start to reflect the details of what is going on in your life at the moment and memories of specific things that have happened to you.

It's interesting that you mention breathing, because I've studied voice and had a voice coach tell me to think about a child screaming at the top of his/her lungs on a bus or train, and how (even though it is extremely annoying) incredibly loud and pure the sound is. Adults have to train themselves for many years to get their voices even close to that strength and perfection because as we grow up and become part of society, we learn to restrict our voices and our breathing.

I don't know why you want to recreate those dreams but you have to remember that children's minds and adults' minds are different. If you want to recreate something close to them, I think you will have to change your ways of thinking and feeling in waking life, possibly through yoga, meditation, taking a long vacation or even counseling to deal with things that may be causing you stress.

Those dreaming theory's are very interesting. But it's not so much the dream I want to recreate so much as that bouncing feeling just because it's unique. You know how when you wake up from a dream you realise it was all dream and it doesn't feel as real as it did? Well I remember this feeling still! It was so real.

As I said, I think you would have to recreate your feelings and attitudes toward things in waking life. You might be able to get close to it through meditation, etc., but I don't think you can ever go back to the way your mind worked when you were a child.

Also, Children are better to remember past lives. So of course their dreams are more vivid.

I had a simmilar feeling as a child, and some other strange dream sensations. I remember feeling as if I'd slowly bounced up, and I liked that, but then I'd just drop really really fast, and that scared me. I never tried to relate it to anything real like an elf or drums, it was just a feeling that I got just before I really fell asleep.

The feeling of dropping really fast sounds a little like the feeling of falling, followed by a hypnic jerk, that we sometimes get as adults.

Maybe it is a more intense version compounded by the fact that as children, feelings and sensations are newer and more intense to us.

I definitely had dreams about flying much more when I was a child.