Have been dwelling on Annalise and her bad dreams, and am unable to sleep myself, so have been reading up tonight (whilst everyone else is asleep) on how to deal with toddlers and their dreams and have been given some great ideas: Apologies if I ramble - I'm sort of thinking on paper!
It seems that at 3 years old, children are very receptive to working with parents on sorting the dreams out as they are so suggestible. One idea I can try is to have her go into her imagination and change the dreams around. That way, I can teach her that it's HER dream and she gets to control it. That means that even after she wakes up, she can imagine the dream any way she wants to.
So, if she wants to, she can make the water a fun place to be with mermaids she can swim with or dolphins, or what ever would be lovely for her. We could both use our imagination to make the dreams fun.
One suggestion if it is a very bad nightmare that makes her scared, is I could teach her to "let that one go". There are apparently some techniques to let go of haunting images. One is to imagine that the image is a photograph and she can "in her minds eye" rip up the photo into tiny little bits. Or she can "turn the dream into dust", by putting 'it' in the palm of her hand, and blowing it away.
Another suggestion is to get a nice, natural aromatherapy spray and spray it in the room before bedtime. It could be an anti-monster spray, or it can be something to chase away bad dreams.
I also like the idea of getting a dream catcher to hang in her room - they are of Native American origin I think - I have attached a picture of one I found on Amazon. Will have to try to find one here or maybe I'll make one for the time being until I get to the UK in summer!
So from tomorrow onwards, I'm going to try some of these ideas.
Sweet dreams, my baby girl!
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