Love Bug has been talking about bad dreams this week. She spoke with grandma about them, and last night just before she went to bed she asked me if I ever had scary dreams. If only it were a ploy to have me let her sleep in my bed, and not real.
I don’t know if other families have particularly awful nightmares, but Love Bug belongs to three girls who do. My Little Sister, to this day, has terrible bad dreams. My mum has them and so do I. Since the shake up in our lives early this year my dreams have been horrific again. So how do we deal with it?
Tell them: Scat away bad dreams. Go away. Turn on all the lights and check cupboards, behind doors, under beds and tables, behind furniture, corners of rooms {for spiders}, have a glass of water and try to go back to sleep, preferably cuddling a dog.
And that’s just me.
So Love Bug and I talked about telling dreams to go away. Then she looked up at me once we’d agreed that was a good thing to do and asked they are only pretend are they mumma? with a look that broke my heart. Of course they are only pretend. If you need me, you just call out. Bella and Beary and I are all here and we’ll come and get you if you need us.
Which made her scream in the middle of the night, and our very teary drop off at kindy this morning all the more difficult to bear.
bumpyroadtobubba 
So, so hard. We had one who didn’t quite have bad dreams, but she would be wide awake until 2 am many nights as she kept herself (and her parents) awake and deeply upset from contemplating life, death, and eternity. And this was from age 4 on. She had night terrors, as well. I think parenting is hardest in the middle of the night. -Amy at http://www.momgoeson.wordpress.com
Sheesh! That is scary. Wishing peaceful sleeps for all of you. xo
I have always had bad dreams as does my Mum and we now can’t read the gruffalo book as my little girl has bad dreams about it. My lovely husband came up with the idea for ‘gruffalo spray’ which is just some water with vanilla in it which we spray around her room at bed time and say ‘gruffalos be gone’ it has really helped, any version of bad dream or monster repellant like this is good, and then my fail safe for going back to sleep or to sleep in the first place if I am scared is to run through all of the people in the world that love me and say their names out loud as it takes all of the bad feeings away and replaces them with good. If my little girl has a bad dream, we sit together and say the names of all the people that love her and it seems to help her too. (oh and she has to have a soft light on all night). I hope this helps, even a little bit.
Send her a big hug from me!!
I had a niece who was having bad dreams when she was not much older the Bubba, we made a dream catcher to keep those nasty dreams away and touch wood it seems to have helped her.