I had bad night terrors as a kid. They continued as occasional bad nightmares. They were horrible and what I wanted more than anything else was for someone to comfort me and help me feel safe. in my case, I would either be awake or dream I was awake but with shadows coming to life in weird and horrible shapes, all mosnters of vrious kinds that would rush at me to attack me if I dared close my eyes. I would try to scream but no sound would come out. When I was older (into my teens) I would sometimes lie awake for hours not daring to move (I counted the time from the chiming of the clock).
It was one thing I valued a great deal about getting married - I had someone to reach out for if I woke up from a nightmare.
What worked for me best - having access to a bed lamp that I could switch on if I needed it. The lamp would banish allshaows which would immediately make me feel safe. A torch is no good because whwn you use a torch, shadows move.
My parents felt that giving me a bed lamp or night light would stop me from lerning to cope. In fact I feel it was the wrong approach - what I needed was the chance to control my fears myself by having a light I could choose to switch on or off as I felt I could cope. I did later try to acclimatise myself to the dark, it wasn't the dark that was the problem. It was the combination of my imagination plus a highly active mind.
With the kids - the boys especially would get bad nightmares. All the kids did, but the boys would have waking terrors. easy child 2/difficult child 2 also had nightmares, I put it down to the very active mind. I would encourage the kids to come and let me know if they had nightmares. They always had their own bed lamp plus when they were little a night light as well. I'm sure it helped reduce the intensity of the problem.
When te kids came to me to let me know they had a nightmare, I would encourage them to talk about it, to tell me what thye were dreaming about. That way I could help work out what the cause was. Often it wasn't so much something for them to avoid, as an aid to help me identify what was over-stimulating them or what was worrying them.
I know when I was very young, if I dreamed about animals of any kind, even our family pets or something as beautiful as butterflies, somehow in my dream the animals woud distort and become something evil. I remember my mother trying to help me by suggesting I dream about butterflies - I had an appalling nightmare tat night which began with butterfleis in the garden.
I needed to develop my own coping strategies, including teaching myself to wake myself up if I observed a dream "going bad". I also learned that if I woke up enough to change position, that often it was enough to change whatever was going on in my brain enough to "change topic" in the dream. So a tip I gave my kids, after they had come to me, snuggled up, told me about their dream - was to send them back to bed telling them to make sure they lay down on the other side. I told them that if they woke from a bad dream, to roll over and the bad dream would then trickle out of their ear (the one now facing the pillow) and go away.
So why the apparent correlation of bad dreams with difficult children? I tihnk it's to do with the amount of stimulation in their day. A bright kid can get a lot of information into their head in a day. A difficult child who has a lot to cope with and a great deal to have to learn, will often be concentrating very hard, a lot more than the average kid (even if it doesn't look it sometimes). So again, when they go to sleep their brains have a lot more 'filing" to do, and it is the process of assimilating and organising the inforamtion gained through the day, that can sometimes cause nightmars as these images and concepts get jumbled. The brain is not only filingthe information, it is trying to make sense of it and cotinue the thinknig process. This is where dreams come from. If there is a problem not resolving, the brain is tapping the consciousness on the shoulder, trying to alert the sleeper to the need to do something about a problem. The best you can do is equip your child with the skills to learn to manage their own dreams, including teaching them to recognise what various symbols mean. And I don't agree with Freud, I don't think it's all about sex. Maybe it was for him, but not for everybody. Symbols will mean slightly different things to different people, over time you do work it out for yourself but there are some universal symbols which, if not exactly correct, will come close. For example, to dream about death usually means NOT death, but change. To dream about your house (especially any space you identify as yours) is to actually be dreaming about your own mind, your own sense of self. To dream about being in someone else's house MAY mean that you're still dreaming about your own mind, but it could be that aspect of yourself as it relates to the person whose house you are in, in the dream. What you were doing in that house, what was happening to you in that house, often represents your fears, or your ambitions, for yourself.
The emotions felt during the dream are also important and often add extra layers to the meaning of a dream. And I found that once a child was helped to understand what the dream meant (and it was usually far less sinister than the dream appeared) they learned to cope, plus they learned to not fear their dreams so much.
My own methods of helping our kids with their nightmares were undoubtedly born form my own nasty experiences. I didn't want my kids to suffer for years as I did.
Marg