The past few months my little dude has been having nightmares. Fears about everything from the characters from ZooTopia to the closet in his bedroom has filled his every waking and sleeping moments. He has been to scared to go upstairs by himself, or downstairs and has gotten into the routine of having fear about something, before even trying to do it.
It has been nightly wakings from nightmares.
Panicked calls if we aren’t visible to him at any given moment.
Fear of everything.
The lack of sleep for us is one thing, but even worse is watching him move through his day with this undercurrent of fear and worry. He has always been a deep thinker, but his imagination was going too dark, too vivid and too scary.
We had tried keeping a light on in his room all night, but that just made the shadows bigger. We moved his dresser in front of his cupboard door to “block” any worry from that space, but he still thought about it. We gave his room a deep clean and purge, making the corners visible and filling it with only items that brought him happiness, but he was still too scared to be in there alone, even in the daytime.
None of it worked. Until we tackled his brain.
I love falling asleep and for as long as I remember would “set” my dreams by playing them out in my imagination as I would fall asleep. So for the last week I have been teaching him how to dream. How to control the thoughts in his brain, create wonderful daydreams and bring these thoughts into his mind at night.
We talked about how his brain was just like a TV set. He could choose the channels, and if something started to play that he didn’t like, he could just “change it” with a click of the button.
We worked through dreams he would like to have (apparently finding a real live Pikachu would be his ultimate awesome) and we started his dreams together.
He still has some day time anxiety about some spaces in our home, but to be honest, so do I. We live in a creaky, 100 year old house with all sorts of creepy nooks and crannies, and any sane person would have their imagination run wild on a windy night.
But the nightmares have ceased. When he wakes, he has learned to “change the channel” in his brain and bring back the dreams he WANTS in his head, and just turn off the nightmares.
And this means I get to spend the night dreaming as well!