OK, so everyone has been so helpful in compiling a cd for Simon I thought I would put out a call for other helpful tips.
Simon has been having nightmares. It has been upsetting for him and has been difficult to think of solutions for it. Simon has told me in no uncertain terms that the way I have been trying to help has not been very effective in his case.
It has been a vey long time since I had nigtmares myself. It seems that my own nightmares stopped about the time that my own dreams became more lucid. One you knew you were dreaming, you could fly. If you could fly, there was nothing to be worried about. Monsters chasing you? Fly away. Plus, it is only a short hop from flying to any other abillity which would help you more easily deal with those scary things threatening you. My plans with Simon have been centered around trying to get him to fly in his dreams. He tells me it does not work. Yet, I hope.
KWW reads lots of books, and in the past has read even more. She has said to me that seeing as now he is so consciously concerned with becoming powerful (please refer to "oedipus ox") that he subconsciusly balances it out and becomes un-powerful and scared of monsters. Makes a certain sense to me, but I'm not real happy with just waiting it out.
Do you remember any good nightmare solutions? I'm sure Simon will be happy to give any of them a shot.
4 comments:
I used to have recurring nightmares, and what worked for me was that I learned how to "re-dream". Don't like how the nightmare ended? Go back to wher eyou thought "if only" ("if only I'd turned left instead of right!") and change the ending. As long as you fell asleep quick enough, you could enter back into the nightmare and change the end.
Of course, I was like fourteen when I figured this out. But hey. That's only, like, nine years away, right?
Otherwise, I'd just say, hug him and hold him when he has a nightmare.
I am also thinking that we need to stop watching any movie or show that involves magical creatures or has plot lines that may induce fear. Stick to realistic things that may be suspenseful or easy to dismiss. Like the family friendly animal adventures of Free Willy and Beethoven or Long Journey Home, or I know there are a blue million, I have only seen LJH which is fine, but maybe other folks know better ones. I think I could convince Simon that Paulo would not have to fight a bear...
My mom just always tried to have a rational discussion with me about what is real and what is not when I'd wake-up with nightmares. I wouldn't recommend this as the only method, mostly because it didn't help me 'handle' the problem. But as I got older it did help me deal with them on my own. I could sit up in bed and seperate the real from the unreal mentally, and then try and go back over the nightmare and identify what different parts of the dream might represent, or be a sign of stress.
Man, that's a tough one! We haven't had a lot of issues with nightmares, so I don't have a lot of advice. M used to have a lot of problems with being frightened while trying to sleep, so we would talk about things to keep her mind off the bad things. Shel Silverstein had that poem about "What If?", where he would imagine all sorts of crazy "what if" scenarios, and I would talk to her about that when she would get scared in the night. I'd try to take it so far so that she'd laugh, and get her mind off being scared. Like, "What if Scooby grew another leg?" and once she got to laughing then she wouldn't be so scared. So maybe that would work with nightmares too.
I like the idea of realizing you are dreaming and changing things mid-dream. I didn't figure that one out until I was in high school or so, and I still can't always do it.
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