Dreaming In The Womb

During the final phase of pregnancy babies spend about 90% of their time asleep, and when they sleep, nothing will wake them. One of the things revealed by the 4D scans is the fact that babies have REM, rapid eye movement sleep, a period of sleep where the eyes flick around behind the eyelids. Later in life we know this is an indication of dreaming. This gentle flicker of an eye could be a sign that the fetus, still with a month to go before even being born, is already dreaming.

In adulthood, dreaming plays a vital role in allowing us to make sense of events around us, and to develop strategies to deal with the world.  In a fetus, dreaming, however simple the dreams, may be the crucial process that stimulates the brain to grow and develop.

Each minute the fetus makes two and a half million nerve cells and now after eight months his brain is filled with more than a hundred billion neurons with a hundred trillion connections as many as there are stars in our galaxy.

Babies begin dreaming in the womb while they are sleeping. Babies spend most of their time asleep inside the womb. A 32-week old fetus spends 90-95% of his/her time sleeping. Brain wave studies show that they may also experience rapid eye movement (REM). The REM stage is when the body is completely relaxed and the brain is active. Dreams occur during the REM stage of the sleep cycle. While adults spend only 20% of their sleep in the REM phase, babies in the womb get around 10 hours of REM sleep every day. Researchers believe that this REM phase of sleep may indicate that babies in the womb are having at least some form of dreams. What exactly they are dreaming remains unknown, but it could be the sensations they feel in the womb. However, adults do not always dream during the REM phase of sleep. So, we cannot be sure that babies in the womb do either. 

Some neuroscientists argue that babies need to dream because a baby needs a model of the real world via consciousness. In other words, the baby needs to construct conscious agents in order to experience the real world as we know it. Since unborn babies lack imagination or visual capacity, dreams allow them to practice and learn. Also, infants need to develop cognitive thinking abilities. So it may be the case that your baby dreams about everything simply because their brains now have enough experience to draw from.

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