Solution Stories 1.
Nigel's Nightmares

by Dr. Ben Furman

Nigel's Nightmares is a story about a little boy who finds a solution to his problem of a recurring nightmare. Nigel spends the night at his granny's house and learns from her that all dreams have a happy ending if only you dare to go all the way.

Page 4.
It was a Friday morning when Nigel and his parents where having breakfast together.
Nigel was drinking chocolate and eating serials. His parents where drinking coffee and eating sandwiches.
Listen Nigel, said father. We will go out to dinner with our friends this evening and you will go to granny for the night.

Page 5.
Nigel felt like crying but he did not say a word. Tears were running down his cheeks right into his cereal bowl.
Oh my, said mother, you are crying. What are you crying for? You like granny. Don't you like to sleep over at her place?

Page 6.
Nigel could not help it. He started to cry out loud.
Father started to get nervous. What got into him? Father asked the mother.
Don't get nervous, you. It may have something to do with his nightmares.
I see, said father.

Page 7.
During the past weeks Nigel had had nightmares almost every night. The nightmare was always the same. Big lorries were chasing him trying run over him. The nightmare used to wake him up in the middle of the night. After that he would sit on his bed and jut cry and cry. Mother and father had to calm him down and it could take up to fifteen minutes before he fell asleep again.

Page 8.
Evenings Nigel was afraid to go to sleep. One evening when mother had already given him a good night kiss and told him good night, he said:
I am not going to sleep at all. I will stay awake all nigh. That way I wont have that awful nightmare.

Page 9.
C'mon, don't say that. You must sleep at night. Everyone must sleep at night. If a person does not sleep at night, he is so tired next day that he cannot do anything.
I don't care said Nigel. Anyway, I will stay awake all night, said Nigel decisively.

In fact, Nigel did fall asleep in no time but if it only would have been possible, there is no doubt about it, that he would have stayed up all night in order to escape his nightmares.

Page 10.
Nightmares or not, you will go to granny anyway. We have not had a chance to go out, just me and your mother, and parents need some time on their own too, said father impatiently.
Yes, but we can inform granny about the nightmares, thought. Granny can for example, leave the door open to Nigel's room. When the door is open, granny will hear if Nigel wakes up and can come and soothe him.

Page 11.
When the parents left Nigel to granny's for the night that evening they were so busy that they simply forgot to inform granny about Nigel's nightmares. Nigel thought to himself that he will do it himself when granny puts him to bed.

Page 12.
When granny was reading the bedtime story to Nigel, he said:
You know granny, I have a nightmare almost every night. It is always the same awful dream. There are huge trucks trying to run me over. I cry in my dream and then I wake up. Mom or dad comes to comfort me and it may take quite some time before I fall asleep again.

Page 13.
Granny listened to Nigel attentively and then whispered into his ear.
- Listen, Nigel, I can tell you a secret about nightmares. Do you want to hear it? She said.
Nigel was puzzled. He nodded to signal that he wanted to know what the secret was.
There are no nightmares, said granny.
Nigel did not understand a thing.

Page 14.
Granny explained:
Look, the fact is that all dreams have a happy ending. Only sometimes a person may wake up in the middle of a dream, at a moment when something exiting is happening so that he misses the end of the dream. I can bet that your dream with those trucks has a happy ending, but you have to continue to see it in order see what happens.
Nigel wondered, could it really be so.

Page 15.
Do you remember the Bambi video? Asked granny all of a sudden.
Nigel nodded.
Do you remember that there is an exiting moment when Bambi's mother dies. That part is so tragic that even me, an older person, always cry when I see it. Don't you think it would be horrible if at that moment there was an electricity blackout and you could not see the film any further. The film has a happy ending but only if you have a chance to see it to the end.

Page 16.
But I don't know how the dream ends because I always wake up when the trucks start chasing me.
So you do but perhaps you would not wake up if you knew how the dream continues.
- How does it continue then? Asked Nigel in bewilderment.

Page 17.
You can never know for sure but you can always imagine the happy ending. What do you suppose will happen after the trucks have been chasing you?
I don't know said Nigel. He was thinking.
I don't know either but I can imagine that you would find that the trucks would not run over you but they would only come close to you and perhaps they would want to give you something. What might they want to give you?
Nigel got excited about the thought. He said: "An ice hockey racket!"

Page 18.
"An ice hockey racket", repeated granny. I should have guessed that knowing that you are such a champion ice hockey player. So the dream might continue with the trucks surrounding you, you would lower you head and you would start cry. When you would lift up your head again, to your surprise the truck drivers would have come out of the trucks and they would ask you to come inside the trucks. Inside each of them there would be a kind of a sport shop and you would be asked to choose one item from each one of them. Would you like that? If something like that would happen, would that make the nightmare become a good dream?
- Sure, said Nigel.

Page 20.
I am not saying that the dream will continue like that. You can come up with something else instead. But now that you go to sleep, think about how you want your dream to end. If you think hard of the happy ending, you will see that your nightmare will turn into a goodmare.
What is a goodmare, asked Nigel in bewilderment.
It is the good dream behind the nightmare that comes to us when we have the courage to see how the bad dreams end, explained granny.

Page 21.
When Nigel put his head to the pillow, he imagined how the trucks surrounded him and how he was invited inside of them. In one of them he chose a ice hockey racket that had the original signature of his favourite player.

Page 22.
From another truck he got an fantastic ice hockey helmet and from the third truck he got a cool shirt. When he was falling asleep he was almost hoping to have the very dream that he had so much been afraid of.

Page 23.
When mom and dad came to pick him up the next morning, they asked granny how the night had gone.
- We were going to tell you last evening that Nigel has recently had a recurring nightmare but we were so much in a hurry that we forgot all about it. Did Nigel wake up in the night because of his nightmare?
- No, he didn't . He slept throughout the night like a log.

Page 24.
That's surprising. I think that must be like the first night in two weeks when he does not have his nightmare. What magic has granny been using again? Asked mother smiling.
I just told Nigel how to turn nightmares into goodmares. Nothing magic about that. By the way, Nigel, how did you manage? Did you see the end of the dream?
- I tried but it didn't work. The dream just never came.
Granny smiled and padded Nigel on the head.

Page 25.
Next evening when Nigel was already in bed browsing through a picture book, mom went to talk with him.
- Listen Nigel, I have never told you, but sometimes I have nightmares tool. Not every night but every now and then I have the same unpleasant nightmare. Could you please tell me what granny told you about how to turn nightmares into goodmares?

Nightmares: What they are and how to help children overcome them.
An overview for parents by Dr. Ben Furman

"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.