What do you say to a preschooler who doesn’t want to have dreams?

[Anonymous]

I’m not being very consistent and I wonder if anyone has a great line to reassure a little person who is afraid of dreaming.

[Anonymous]

Huh? Tell them if they go to sleep breathing in and out through their nose they won't have dreams or something.

[Anonymous]

I'd tell them that dreams let them be a fireman or princess or whatever they want to be for one night. Then maybe build on what PP said and say but if you sleep on your left side you don't have them. Then they have the option to opt out, or think they have the option. Also, if the wake up with a dream you can say, 'oh you must have rolled over'.

[Anonymous]

How can you avoid dreaming?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Huh? Tell them if they go to sleep breathing in and out through their nose they won't have dreams or something.

What??

[Anonymous]

One of my child who is a bit of a control freak hates having nightmares and dreams he can’t control. We tell him he doesn’t have to go to sleep he just has to rest his eyes for a bit. He sleeps but wakes up convinced he did not sleep.

[Anonymous]

What the freak? Tell them tough luck and move on with life. You don’t need to feed into every weird curiosity.

[Anonymous]

Depends on the kid. I would have told my preschooler about REM cycles and the theories of what causes dreams, because I found that demystifying stuff helped address fears.

For another kid, I might have done a dreamcatcher craft project and told them the story of what dreamcatchers are supposed to do, to set them at ease.

It really depends on what works for you kid and what they respond to. There's no one magic phrase.

[Anonymous]

I'd give them a snuggle and say I understand kiddo, sometimes dreams can be scary, but sometimes they are wonderful and you don't want to miss those! If you have a scary dream, I'm here and I will help you.

We still have a baby monitor in my preschooler's room & sometimes if she's really frightened I will remind her that its there and tell her I'm watching (even though it's only sometimes on and nearly always muted on our end). My older kid got a dream catcher from her grandma and that also helped her feel less frightened.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of my child who is a bit of a control freak hates having nightmares and dreams he can’t control. We tell him he doesn’t have to go to sleep he just has to rest his eyes for a bit. He sleeps but wakes up convinced he did not sleep.

My now 6yo was convinced she slept with her eyes open from about age 4 until recently.

She also didn’t like dreaming around that same time, so we told her to replay the movie Frozen (her fav at the time) when she went to bed. That worked pretty well!

[Anonymous]

Is she having nightmares? Tell her everybody dreams (even if it’s not true).