Childhood Nightmares: How to Help Your Child Understand the Meaning Behind Common Nightmares

We can all remember some of our childhood nightmares. I remember one of my first: a huge spider shot an arrow into my heart. What is one of your earliest nightmare memories? As we grow older, have children, and watch our children wake up crying after a scary dream, it's often difficult to know how to give comfort. Here are a few strategies that might help you the next time your child complains of a "really scary dream".

• Remember most children's dreams reflect events in their daily life. Normally a dream reflects emotions, thoughts, and feelings about something that has happened in the last few days. Some children's dreams may contain themes that have occurred throughout life.

• Children's dreams tend to involve more aggression than adult dreams. They also contain fewer characters but the characters that do turn up tend to represent their families, friends, or teachers. Children's dreams often have monsters and shadow figures and contain more animals and favorite objects than adult dreams.

• Children 12 and under often take their dreams literally. (Even in my work with adults, many adults still believe their most frightening dreams are a foreshadowing of events to come). Part of your job will be to reassure your child that the content isn't real, but the feelings in the dream are, and probably reflect their own feelings at some level. Children are very relieved when they are told that dreams represent feelings about our lives and not real things that may hurt them!

• Children benefit from an understanding of why we dream and what our dreams say about our feelings and thoughts. Children's dreams often will reflect a sense of powerlessness over their lives.

• If your child reports nightmares frequently it is critical to explore the dream content and what events might be causing these dreams. Most often the events are normal childhood problems, but occasionally nightmares may reflect a serious problem occurring in a child's life or an event the child is not talking about.

• Ask these questions when your child tell you about a nightmare:

o How did you feel in the dream?

o Have you ever felt that way when you are awake?

o When did you last feel the feeling you had in your dream?

o Tell me about the event or situation that caused that feeling.

o How can I help you with the situation that caused the feeling?

Recommended books on Children's Dreams: Your Child's Dreams (Garfield)

Nightmare Help: A Guide for Parents and Teachers (Wiseman)

For more help understanding dreams, why we dream, dream symbols and signs, and getting professional help with disturbing dreams contact http://DreamsHelp.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Susan_Baragia

Spirit Children

The concept of spirit children is a belief held by many ancient cultures. The belief is based on the idea that a spirit child selects his parents before or at the time of conception. Along with this idea it is only reasonable to assume the parents would also have to agree to this arrangement.

This falls in line completely with the concept of free will, which we all possess. Nothing is done in our life or pre-existence without our consent. Free will has a play in every aspect of life, one simply cannot have free will in choosing whether to have a hamburger or fish sandwich and not have free will in choosing every aspect of our life. Free Will is a law of Nature and thus cannot be changed.

The Aborigines of the Australian out back were and still are firm believers of the spirit child theory. They accept it unequivocally, even going so far as to accept the child if the known father is someone else than the mother's mate. In aborigine custom, the father has to dream of the child before it can be his. The dream actually has more to do with parental lineage than sperm.

Many times a male aborigine will dream of his child many years before conception. Many times the dream occurs during periods of hunting or isolation from their families. In a representative dream, a small dark-skinned spirit-child, two to three inches high, reveals its name and expresses a desire for birth. If the man has several wives, he chooses the most appropriate mother and describes her whereabouts to the spirit-child. Often times the spirit child will tell the father of another soul desiring to be his spirit child and that such child will arrive in so many years.

Even after the aborigines learned of the concept of conception, they still held to the belief that it wasn't necessary for the birth of a child. This idea could even have a bearing on the idea of an immaculate conception held by many religions.

The aborigine way of life is mainly a spiritual way of life, everything is centered around the dream time. They believe we "dream up" every thing before it actually can happen in the physical world. Thus the dreams of the individual are very important as they are an indication of things to come.

After they began to adopt the white man's ways, the birth rates began to drop in many of the tribes. A missionary's advice, "Increase ual contact with your wives," fell upon deaf ears. The Worora knew that conception depends upon a spirit-child's will to be born. The physical act was "more or less insignificant," even though the men had been educated about male sperm.

To me this only strengthens the belief there has to be a spiritual bond between mother, father and child to create a bond that will last through eternity. As is the case in every aspect of life, if there is no spiritual connections, there is no connection.

I have traversed the globe in search of truth, my truth, during which time I have had an opportunity to study with Aborigine elders, native American Indians, and some of the world's finest intuitive. All of this has lead me to better understand our world and all things therein contained. I have created a blog to share some of my adventures and knowledge as I see it.

Please fell free to comment.

http://www.manymanyworlds.com.

I am available for private consultation.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gary_Wonning