Both adults and children have unpleasant or terrible dreams. But for children dreams and reality are often difficult to distinguish.
The problem of night fears in children begins to appear at the age of two, and from 3 to 5 years, it is felt especially strongly. Approximately 12 years of age, the problem often goes away completely.
The fact that the child has terrible dreams can be concluded by the intensity of muscles in his sleep, changing the usual posture, covering with a blanket with his head, motor anxiety, sweating, rapid heartbeat and breathing, night screaming, waking up with crying and trying to get up and run to parents.
What do children dream?
Dreams are difficult to classify, but some age-related dynamics of childhood dreams can be traced.
The number of fears and nightmares increases in children from 3 to 7 years of age, which coincides with an awareness of the existential problems of life and death that characterize this age period.
At the age of 2-5 years, terrible dreams can often accompany the fears of the day - loneliness, darkness, confined space.
At the age of 5-7 years, there is a large number of age-related fears of cars, planes, hurricanes, floods, height, depth, pain. In a dream, all these fears are transformed into threatening, life-threatening monsters.
In the younger school-age of 7-10 years, the night space is filled with representatives of the beyond, which also reflects the deep fear of death on the one hand, and on the other hand, the fear of condemnation and social rejection due to any misconduct. At this age, the formation of conscience is completed, and this is the reason for the various fears of children, which are experienced at an unconscious level as fear of not meeting expectations, fear of rejection and punishment by parents in the first place.
Closer to the age of 10, dreams with falls into the abyss, from the roof, are typical. All the fears and tensions during the day related to the experience of failure or insolvency accumulate and receive their allegorical expression at night, when the fall can be interpreted not only as a physical phenomenon but also as psychological - a fall from the pedestal, from the height of the position (Zakharov A.I., 2006).
In adolescence, dreams become less fantastic and more specific in content, approaching reality.
Why does a child have bad dreams?
After falling asleep, the child is in the initial phase of drowsiness, which systematically flows into a state of deep sleep. In an hour and a half the phase in which the child's psyche forms dreams, positive or negative. The child sleeps for about 20 minutes, not all night. In the final phase, any external and internal stimuli can lead to the creation of certain images.
During the night's rest, the unconscious part of the psyche takes control of the mind, which, with the help of dreams, makes it possible to splash out emotions that are suppressed during the day's waking hours. After experiencing excessive stressful situations during the day, they can transform into nightmares in their sleep.
This is a natural reaction of the child's psyche, allowing the subconscious to get rid of negative emotions. This is what causes terrible dreams. In most cases, it does not represent any threat. But if the child has nightmares quite often, parents need to deal with changing the emotional state of the baby.