Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and
older figures in the story. This article presents three methods to study intergenerational
encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s
books. First, a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books shows that the older the characters
are, the less they are described as dreaming. A close reading of intergenerational dreams
lays bare, amongst others, the associations of dreaming with healing and death. Finally,
a reader response study reveals that young children already understand some dream
mechanisms and that older readers sometimes may draw on Freudian theory to interpret
dreams, but that some also resist that.