Nightmares:
What they are and how to help children overcome them.

"Problems brought about by imagination
are best solved with the help of imagination"

A nightmare is dream in which a child experiences intense anxiety, often so intense enough to wake him up. Children often have nightmares after having experienced something scary but they may also have nightmares when nothing particularly scary or anxiety provoking has taken place.

Sporadic nightmares are so commonplace and normal that there is no reason to let them alarm you. The child wakes up, seeks comfort from his parents, falls asleep and sleeps soundly throughout the night.

Nightmares become a problem when the child has them frequently or when he experiences the same nightmare repeatedly. In such cases it is possible to help the child become free of his nightmare.

If the child is experiencing nightmares repeatedly it is possible that he has experienced something that has intimidated him. He may, for example, have

• seen something scary in TV
• heard some scary story
• witnessed violence
• seen a crime or an accident
• done something forbidden and not told about it
• been harassed by peers

If it turns out that the child has indeed experienced something frightening, it is usually helpful to allow the child to talk about his experience. Anxiety attached to frightening experiences usually decreases when the child talks about the experience, draws pictures about it, or plays a game that allows the child to repeatedly enact the experience. As the anxiety decreases, the nightmare tends to cease.

Chris had seen a fire in which he knew that two persons had died. This experience had shocked him. Soon after he started to talk alarmingly much about death, fire and explosions. He also begun to experience nightmares. His anxiety lifted and his nightmares ceased soon after he spoke about the fire with his parents, drew pictures about what he had seen and what he imagined that had happened. He also seemed to benefit from the fact that his father took him to visit the fire brigade and explained him all about how the fire alarms and fire extinguishers worked.

Talking about anxious experiences, or working through as the saying goes in psychology, does, however, not always help to put an end to nightmares. It is not uncommon that nightmares continue even if the child is given plenty of opportunities to talk about the shocking things he has witnessed. In such cases it is becomes necessary to try to find means to do something about the nightmares regardless of why they appeared in the first place.

Even if it is often thought that nightmares are a sign that the child must have experienced something frightening, this is not always the case. Very often nightmares are intrinsic. That means that they are not triggered by anything the child has experienced in the real world but rather by something frightening that the child has fathomed in his own mind.

The approach that granny taught to Nigel in this story can be used to treat both kinds of nightmares, those that have their origin in something the child has experienced in the real world as well as those that are triggered by scary things produced in his own mind by his imagination. In fact the approach can be used to alleviate any kinds of fears and phobias. The more astute the child becomes at replacing worrisome fantasies wilfully with more appealing ones, the less he will be troubled by fears.

Fears created by fantasy - in dreams as well as when awake - are an integral part of children's development. As the child grows, he gradually becomes capable of distinguishing real threats of the outside world from fears created by his own fantasy. In this learning process he needs a great deal of practice, and nightmares lend themselves well for this practice.

In a nutshell:
When your child experiences nightmares at night or when he experiences any kind of anxiety caused by scary fantasies,
- let the child tell you the details of his scary dream of fantasy
- admire the child for being so brave as to have the courage to face such scary things
- show the child how he can break the spell of his scary fantasies by modifying them at will, by replacing scary ones with more pleasant ones at will.