Development and Validation of a Dream Content Questionnaire for School Age Children

Developmental studies of dream content have demonstrated that children's dreams reflect the ego and personality development. We designed a study to objectively evaluate the dream content through questionnaire and determine the relationship with personality traits. Three questionnaire were administered to a sample of 80 children from a school of Rome: 1) Dream Content Questionnaire for Children (ChDCQ): derived from a retrospective questionnaire on the dream contents for adult based on classification method of Hall and Van de Castle and Hunt.; 2) Student Sleep Habits Questionnaire (SSHQ) with question about sleep, somnolence and circadian typology; 3) the Eysenck Personality Inventory Junior (EPIj). The ChDCQ showed a good level of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.81) and a good temporal stability. Factor analysis extracted seven factors: accounting for 52.81% of the variance: 1. Aggression; 2. Friendliness; 3. Inhibition of aggressivenes; 4. Characters and sexual interactions; 5. Negative emotions; 6. Positive emotions; 7. Bizarreness/Archetypal. Personality traits correlated with several ChDCQ factors: Psychoticism with aggression and inhibition of aggressiveness, friendly interactions and positive emotions; Extraversion with aggression, characters and sexual interactions and archetypal; Neuroticism with inhibition of aggressiveness, negative emotions and archetypal. Gender differences have been found in ChDCQ; male dreams have higher contents of Aggression while female dreams showed more Friendliness and Negative or Positive Emotions. Our study showed that the ChDCQ was well accepted, easy to fill out and not time-consuming. It could be used for evaluating the differences in dream content in clinical groups (i.e. children with major depressive disorders and anxiety disorders) and also for assessing the relationships with other tests (i.e. personality or sleep questionnaires).