When do babies start dreaming?

Baby is still a few years away from dreaming about showing up to school in her underwear, but is still dreaming up a storm, even when she is nothing more than a bun in your oven!

When do babies start dreaming in the womb?

Researchers have no way of asking babies whether they dream, or what they dream about, so they have to be very creative when determining when babies might start dreaming in the womb, and have used a number of different methods to produce largely inconclusive results.

REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is when grownups do most of their dreaming, and scientists have discovered that babies in the womb may begin experiencing REM around week 23, and therefore likely start dreaming away themselves at this point. However, grownups don’t always dream during REM sleep, so we can’t be sure that babies do either - it’s not like they have much information with which to populate their dream universes!

The bottom line

Because it’s pretty much impossible to figure out when babies start dreaming in the womb, or what they dream about, we might as well just imagine Baby dreaming of you!