Turn Nightmares into Sweet Dreams
A technique called imagery therapy is helping kids reduce the frequency of recurring nightmares, a Canadian clinical psychologist says. Dr. Mélanie St-Onge studied 20 children, aged 9–11, all of whom had experienced bad dreams at least once a week over the past six months. Most had been having nightmares since the age of 4 or 5.
The young subjects were asked to keep a morning dream journal to record the details of any dreams and nightmares they had had during the night. The evening after a nightmare, the children were to lie in bed with their eyes closed and rewrite the script of the bad dream to remove any frightening aspects. They then visually rehearsed the revised version for 10 minutes as if watching a movie with a happier outcome—in which, for example, a falling dream became a flying dream. Or, if a child had dreamed he was being chased by a monster, he would imagine turning to the monster and telling it to leave him alone and stop scaring him.
During 12 months of follow-up, all 20 kids practising imagery therapy experienced a drop in nightmare frequency to an average of just one per month. “Children are very imaginative, so imagery is a logical tool to give them control over their bad dreams,” St-Onge says. “Furthermore, youngsters often feel that they are not really in control, and this therapeutic technique can also help overcome their sense of powerlessness.” Dr. Patricia Garfield, president of the Association for the Study of Dreams in Tiburon, Calif., agrees. “The main thing is to empower children to take action with regard to bad dreams. Parents can help kids face the scary figures, call for help and fight by themselves until help arrives.”
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