Not just a dream

What’s the best way to comfort a child who wakes up distressed from a nightmare or bad dream?

We might be eager to soothe and calm, to say ‘Don’t worry, it was just a dream’, but is there a better approach, one that helps reduce your child’s scary dreams, and strengthen your bond?

How do you feel when you wake up from a nightmare? Even though you might tell yourself that it wasn’t real, it didn’t happen, it was just a dream, how long does it take for the emotion to subside? How often do you think about the dream during the day? How anxious are you when you go to bed the next night, how worried are you that the nightmare might return and cause the same level of distress all over again?

A nightmare, a bad dream, even a good dream, is so much more than just a dream.

While you’re dreaming, the dream feels real, the lion really is chasing you, fear is coursing through your body and remains with you if you wake from the dream, your heart pumping fast, skin freezing with fear, scary presences lurking in the shadows.

It’s the same for a child.

If we, as adults, feel the dream lingering throughout the day despite rationalising the experience, how much more confused and upset might a young child, unable to rationalise, feel?

So the first thing we need to do is find a way to soothe, calm, and reassure a child in the middle of the night, without dismissing the very real, scary experience she has been through.

Rather than say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a dream’, empathise with your child about the experience, ‘Oh, that must have been so scary’, ‘Oh, you must have felt so sad,’ or, if you’re not sure what the dream was about, ‘Oh, you must have felt so upset’, then follow it with, ‘You’re awake and safe now. Here I am’ as you offer the physical comfort and soothing of cuddles.

If your child is wakeful, gently encourage her to tell you about her dream. Talking about a dream helps us to defuse it, and also helps us to understand it, but I’ll come to that later. More importantly, what you’re doing when listening to your child talk about her dream, is giving her the message that you’re there for her emotionally, that she can come to you throughout her life to talk about her fears, worries, concerns, as well as to share her positive emotions, excitements, and other secrets of her heart. You’re encouraging her to be open, to share her emotions and feelings rather than repress them.

When your child tells you about a dream, you have a wonderful opportunity to help her build her emotional vocabulary, since most dreams are so emotive. Ask her lots of ‘Oh, how did you feel?’ questions as she relates her dream.

How we feel in our dreams is a key to the meaning of a dream, and if you can gain some insight into the meaning of your child’s dream, you can begin to guide her appropriately in the days that follow.

Dreams reflect our conscious and unconscious experiences of the last 1- 2 days, so see if you can relate the emotion your child felt in her dream to what’s been going on for her during the last couple of days. There are plenty of tips on how to interpret and understand dreams throughout this blog, in my books and ebooks, and on The Dream Show.

Pick out a couple of your child’s favourite books, ones that involve facing something scary and finishing with a happy ending. Rather than tell your child her dream was just a dream, tell her it was a story she made up as she slept, only she woke up half way through the story.

Tell her she’s a wonderful storyteller in her dreams, and remind her of her favourite books where something scary happens but it all turns out well in the end. Tell her that together you can now make up the rest of her dream story so that it has a happy ending. (Some of this conversation might be during the night if she is wakeful, otherwise it can be a morning activity, if she still remembers her dream.)

There is only one rule in completing the dream story and it’s this: Don’t kill the wicked witch.

Don’t kill anything when you rewrite, reimagine, or complete a dream story. Everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer. That wicked witch or scary monster might represent her fear, or how she is or isn’t coping with something in her world. To kill it off is to create a hole in the psyche. The key is to transform the wicked witch into a good fairy, or whatever you intuitively feel will encourage the change your child needs to make to resolve her fear, worry, or the issue she’s finding challenging in her world.

Keep telling the new story, or act it out in play, or create it in art, as a painting, collage, model, or even a book. This is a form of dream alchemy. It creates deep positive change.

You might think all this attention to the bad dream is feeding the monster, but it’s doing quite the opposite.

Your child is unlikely to experience the nightmare again, or may experience it with the new, positive ending. What will happen is that she will develop an interest in remembering her dreams, and will also delight in recalling positive, exciting, creative dreams to share with you.

As she grows, she’ll deeply value the input of her dreams, and as a parent she’ll be eager to tell her children that dreams are so much more that just dreams.

P.S. Night terrors See note on night terrors below the video.

Here’s a recent national television segment I did on children’s nightmares on Seven’s The Morning Show. (Update: video no longer available.)

 

Night Terrors

Night terrors are believed to occur in a non-dreaming phase of sleep where the child gets momentarily stuck between deep and light sleep instead of progressing through the full sleep cycle. In this state, the child’s body is awake but her mind is asleep, so she may have her eyes open or even be running around. Trying to calm her or talk to her will not work because she is asleep. A technique that works for many (but not all) children is Scheduled Awakening. Gently wake your child 20-30 minutes after she falls asleep, waking her just enough to have a sip of water and fall back to sleep. This resets her sleep cycle. You need to do this every night for three weeks to permanently reset (bearing in mind the technique doesn’t work for everyone).

 

You might also enjoy