Dealing with your child's nightmares

Dealing with nightmares in children

Should we wake up a child who is obviously suffering a nightmare?

Generally, dreams and nightmares picture in some important image or a series of images the deepest feelings of the dreaming child. Nightmares are bad dreams but worse. The dreamer's survival is often threatened. The dreams mirror in a profound and exaggerated way our major concerns. A dream is a message from the subconscious to the conscious mind, expressed in a symbolic way. Symbols in dreams are evidence of the mind evaluating and processing our deepest feelings, instincts and emotions, and are usually connected with the experiences of the preceding day. Nightmares are common to all children and are clues to the anxieties affecting your child. The child's anxieties can be due to the normal challenges involved in growing up, such as adjusting to peer pressures affecting the child and to the demands of the adults surrounding the child. They can also point to more serious stresses.

Dreams reflect the mixture of conscious and subconscious concerns that we have, and while adults have a more or less clear sense of what is real and what is imaginary, the borders are blurred in children's imagination. Because of their inability to separate inner from outer realities, dreams can be extremely unsettling for children. The dreams which are frightening are borne of anxiety, fears, fights or unresolved conflicts, indicating a lack of sense of feeling safe, at least at this particular moment in the child's life.

If there are some issues in the family where there is a child and in particular when some important issues that cause a lot of tension in the family are not discussed openly. Children are extremely perceptive to such tensions and deeply responsive to family discords, whatever the brave mask or however thick the veil of silence over them the family enacts. Frequently, children perceive such tensions as "monsters" and these monsters may be "visiting" them in the defenceless and lonely dark of the night. Along with the perceived family wishes the child represses the fearful thoughts and images partly because of lack of verbal skills, lack of family attention, or out of guilt if the child has been scolded for being naughty, feels guilty and deserving of punishment.

Why is it essential to wake up a child who is obviously suffering in the middle of a nightmare? Because nightmares are an attempt to force the dreamer to acknowledge something. For as long as the bothering emotion or thought are not expressed and examined, the nightmares will persist and recur, sometimes for many long years. Most children do not have the ability to "rationalise" their fears, put them "out of their minds" or project them out of their system onto others and so, while they may forget during the play and busy activities of the day what troubles them. And so, for a child who wants to be "good" and tries to do best to be "acceptable" and to "belong" with the family and peers, the feelings of insecurity, guilt , fault, culpability or inadequacy may come to the fore with overwhelming violence.

And so, waking the child from a nightmare and showing concern, support, loving kindness, helps the child to feel loved, to dispel doubts and insecurities and to weaken and diminish the sense of threat appearing in form of "monsters". Parents can help a child by understanding the area of concern, the type of anxieties and should consider examining the issue presented by the dream or nightmare more closely with their child.

Initially a child may not be totally awake and not quite aware of being in their own home. He or she may be terrified that the monster or the other threatening figure is still present in the room. It is essential to reassure the child right away firmly, in a most decisive calm manner with concern but strength and a sense of having the power to deal with all monsters. The child should be reassured and comforted without delay, and if the child complains indicating fear of the monster hiding under the bed, behind furniture, door or curtains it is necessary to show that the areas of concern are free and clear. Turn on the light, hold your child (or child's hand), and walk around the room showing every corner being free from danger, be in charge, be strong, calm, loving. It is also quite possible to change the direction of a dream to achieve a positive outcome. This is done by the technique called lucid dreaming which means that part of the conscious mind remains vigilant during sleep to direct the dream scenario. Children can be quite successfully trained to do this.