  We study the Coulomb excitation of pygmy dipole resonances (PDR) in heavy ion
reactions at 100 MeV/nucleon and above. The reactions 68Ni+197Au and 68Ni+208Pb
are taken as a practical examples. Our goal is to address the question of the
influence of giant resonances on the PDR as the dynamics of the collision
evolves. We show that the coupling to the giant resonances affects considerably
the excitation probabilities of the PDR, a result that indicates the need of an
improved theoretical treatment of the reaction dynamics at these bombarding
energies.
