wjr@frog.UUCP (STella Calvert) (02/07/86)
In article <765@gamma.UUCP> tif@gamma.UUCP (Barbara Charles) writes: >I'm interested to know if any parents out there have small children who have >nightmares and are afraid to go to sleep at night. When I was about 5 or 6, I had a series of nightmares that really threw me. And the problem that I was working on was, are dream events real events, or can they safely be ignored? I'm dreaming along, and a monster (combining the worst features of Froggy (Freudians send interpretations of why I was so frightened of his magic twanger to /dev/null), the Scarey Saw Co.'s commercial (this appropriately named commercial involved a buzzsaw seen from Pauline's viewpoint), and all the carnivores on Wild Kingdom) jumped out and threatened to do _things_ to my dreamself. Naturally, I screamed myself awake. Equally naturally, I fought sleep until I couldn't hold out any longer. In early childhood, I was a lucid dreamer, so I decided to experiment with the connection between the dreamworld and waking "reality". The next time I dreamed of a desirable thing (a quarter, back before they were made of peanut butter), I picked it up and tied it in the tail of my pajamas. That morning I woke up, searched my bedcloths and pjs, found no quarter, and was freed of the midnight movies. I interpreted the non-appearance of the quarter as "proof" that there wasn't any connection between dreamdeath and real death. Fell asleep quite happily, and earlier than usual, the next night, slept the night through, and don't recall further problems until I started having nuclear war dreams, several years later. Also disturbing to me, though when I was awake, not as a source of nightmares, was the set of ideas provoked by that pernicious childhood prayer "if I should die before I wake". Now I kept waking up, and thinking maybe I was still me, but how does a little kid know. I couldn't even have pronounced epistemology without getting my mouth washed out with soap! Fortunately, I didn't know the word. So I decided, on shaky grounds, that if I could remember the next morning to look on the wall and see if the star I drew in pencil under the windowsill was really there, this would prove I was still me, and that Big Daddy hadn't taken my soul in the night. (Hey, little kids grapple with such problems, but that doesn't mean they always come up with rigorous tests. At least it was good enough to satisfy me then...) BTW, and sadly, when I decided that dreamtime wasn't real, it stopped the lucid dreaming I had enjoyed whenever there weren't monsters involved. God I loved to fly -- swooping through the skies. But slowly I'm getting that gift back.... LaBerge's book seems to be working. (Send mail or suggest a newsgroup -- lucid dream discussions don't seem to fit here, but I can't think where they do go.) STella Calvert Every man and every woman is a star. Guest on: ...!decvax!frog!wjr Life: Baltimore!AnnArbor!Smyrna!<LotsOfHitchhikingAndShortVisits> !SantaCruz!Berkeley!AnnArbor!Taxachusetts Future: ... (!L5!TheBelt!InterstellarSpace)
ajs@hpfcla.UUCP (02/19/86)
There is a common conception that nightmares are typical and routine in children around the ages of 4-6. My daughter's not that old yet, so I can't speak from personal experience. But the "Handbook of Dreams", a lengthy and scholarly (== many large words and long sentences :-) work has a good chapter on children's dreams. They say that this common belief is a misperception. Studies have apparently shown that, while children do have reasonably predictable stages of dream development, nightmares are more the exception than the norm. They are never "normal". I suspect they are more memorable (for both children and parents) than typical dreams, so they stand out. Alan Silverstein