ABSTRACT
The infantile dream proves its strategic validity for the investigation of dream functions, allowing an in-depth study of certain aspects highlighted by the theories on dream function elaborated for adult dreams. Data collected from several studies show that the wishes fulfilled in infantile dreams were experienced by the children during daytime life, where they were associated with an intense emotional state that was not fully processed and elaborated psychologically and therefore resulted as somewhat “perturbing”. According to the affective-reestablishment (AR) hypothesis, the dream, through the hallucinatory experience of fulfilling a daytime wish, finds a way to resolve the associated disturbing affective state and provides for the “affective-reestablishment” of the child. These dreams operate in a way that safeguards health and psychological functioning and lets the children continue the sleep. Marco’s dream reports, with the wealth of information about his daytime experiences, gives way to increasing specification, confirmation and clarification of the AR hypothesis. In particular, the observation that Marco’s dream reports refer almost exclusively to experiences from the day preceding the dream suggests that the affective-reestablishment function of dreams is somehow considered to be of a circadian nature. The AR hypothesis shows important convergences with the other emotional adaptive function theories and with recent findings from neurophysiological studies on the role of sleep state as an emotional regulator, which are discussed at the end of the chapter.
