ABSTRACT
One of the most impressive collections of a young child's dreams can be found in a work by Niederland published in 1957. S. Freud had spoken of art as "the half-way region of phantasy", and pointed out the parallel qualities of thought processes in dreaming, in the world of phantasy, in children's play, and in art. The process of thinking in images, children's play, and artwork all offer us the possibility of turning away from reality and of finding satisfaction in illusions. In play the spell of the hallucinatory quality of wish-fulfilment in dreaming is broken through the player's proximity to reality and is therefore relativised. Though children's dreams too, presumably from the beginning of the child's capacity to think, are to be regarded as a thinking process and more specifically as problem-solving thinking, this form of thinking requires time to reach a certain level of complexity.
