Nine Keys to Helping Kids with Their Dreams
Here’s what we need to know about listening to children’s dreams and supporting their imaginations:
1. Listen up! When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake.
2. Invite good dreams. Pick the right bedtime reading or, better still, tell stories. Help your child weave a web of good dream intentions for the night — for example, by asking, “What would you most like to do tonight?” Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian.
3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff. If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize that you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to clear out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible.
4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, the color of the sky, and exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there’s something about the future. Say what you would think about it if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call Grandma, and so on.
5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while she does the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, “This is my secret book, and you can’t read it anymore,” do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she’ll let you look in that magic book.
6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams alive through art, dance, theater, and games and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It’s such a release for kids to portray Mom or Dad or other grown-ups in their lives — be ready to be shocked!
7. Help construct effective action plans. Dreams can show us things that require further action — for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help. This will require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork, as you are doing now.
8. Let your own inner child out to play. As you listen to children’s dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play.
9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you’ll find it’s the best home entertainment you can enjoy.
Notice two things that are not on this list but that would be at the very top of a list of what not to do with a child’s dreams:
1. Never say to a child: “It’s only a dream.” Children know that dreams are for real, and that the scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.
2. Do NOT interpret a child’s dreams. You’re not the expert here; the child is.
Those who lose the Dreaming are lost.
— AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SAYING
Too many of us have lost touch with our dreams. It’s no exaggeration to state that our society is suffering a severe and protracted dream drought.
From the viewpoint of many spiritual traditions, this is a very serious condition. It’s through dreams, say the Navajo, that humans keep in touch with the spirit realm. If you have lost your dreams, say the Iroquois, you’ve lost part of your soul. “It is an age-old fact,” declared the great psychologist C. G. Jung in his last major essay, “that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”1
There are three main reasons for the dream drought in many modern lives:
1. Bad habits. The rhythms and routines of a typical urban life simply don’t support dream recall. Too often we are jolted awake by alarm clocks — or bedmates, or kids who need to get to school — and stumble out into the world, fueled with caffeine, to try to get through our rounds of deadlines and obligations. In many situations, we have nothing that supports and rewards the habit of taking time to collect our dreams. Most of us also lack a practice for creating a safe space where we can share our dreams, receive helpful feedback, and be supported in devising creative action to embody the guidance and energy of our dreams. If we don’t do something with our dreams, we will not dream well.
2. Fear and regret. We run away from our dreams because we think they might be telling us something we don’t want to hear — about the dark side of ourselves, or trouble or illness ahead. We slam the door and say, “It’s only a dream.” This is a poor strategy. Issues we leave unresolved in the night are likely to come round and bite us in the rear end in the everyday world.
Alternatively, we dream of something wonderful — of joy and delight with Mr. or Ms. Right, of a dream home, a dream job, a world of peace and beauty. But when we wake up, we tell ourselves there’s no one like Mr. Right in our life, or we don’t have the looks or the money or the ability to manifest what we enjoyed in our dreams. So again we kiss off the dreams, telling ourselves they are “only” dreams. Again, this is a foolish reflex. If we can dream it, we may just be able to do it.
3. Artificial sleep cycles. Very often our concept of a good night’s sleep is at odds with our dreams. Many of us believe — supported by any number of sleep doctors and pharmaceutical companies — that we need to spend seven or eight hours each night in uninterrupted sleep. This idea would have amazed our ancestors. Before the advent of artificial lighting (gas and then electricity), most humans experienced “segmented sleep,” divided into at least two distinct cycles, a “first sleep” and a “second sleep,” as they used to be called in England.
Experiments by a team led by Dr. Thomas Wehr for the National Institute of Mental Health suggest that, deprived of artificial lighting, people revert to the ancient sleep plan, with an interval of several hours between the two sleeps. One of the most interesting findings of Wehr’s research is that, during this interval, subjects typically register elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone that helps hens to brood peacefully on their eggs for prolonged periods and assists humans in laying eggs of a different kind, by putting them into a benign, altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation.2 Sleep historian A. Roger Ekirch says flatly, “Consolidated sleep, as we experience it today, is unnatural.”3
Among indigenous and early peoples, the liminal state of dorveille (sleep-wake) is a time when you might stir and share dreams with whoever is available. It’s a highly creative state, so much so that, in my Secret History of Dreaming, I have called it the “solution state,” based on the many scientific discoveries and other breakthroughs that have come to people while in this zone. When we are primed or medicated to give ourselves just one longish sleep period, we limit our chances of recalling and sharing dreams, and we deprive ourselves of easy access to the fertile field of hypnagogia — the images that come and the connections that are made — between sleep and waking.
Five Ways to Break a Dream