Two nights ago, my son woke up at 2:30 AM, crying and calling "Mama, mama" over and over again. He refused to nurse. He wouldn't pay attention to me when I tried to speak soothingly to him. He kept pointing in the direction of the bathroom door, but when I brought him into the bathroom, he continued to cry. I tried changing his nappy, but it didn't work. I tried distracting him with toys, with singing, with talking; nothing calmed him. He was inconsolable for almost 10 minutes. The only thing that worked was me taking him outside of the room and putting him in a new environment.

It was the first time that that had happened. He has had nightmares before, but never one that was this upsetting. This was also the first time that breastfeeding was not enough to comfort him.

I felt bad for him, and I feel bad, too, that there is no way for me to know what his dream was. He's only 13 months old, so he has less than 10 words in his vocabulary.

I was comforted to find out the following day, however, that nightmares are common among toddlers. I had just bought a copy of Smart Parenting's Guide to the Toddler Years and purely coincidentally, I read it yesterday and stumbled upon the section about toddler nightmares. Toddlers still have difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality, the book explained, and this is why nightmares can be so upsetting.

The book's advice was to assure the child, validate his fear, and find out the possible source of the nightmare. These weren't applicable to my son, though, since his language skills aren't that developed yet. But bearing in mind the explanation that young children can't distinguish between dreams and reality, I suppose the best thing we can do for our children is to help them feel that the reality they are in is safe and filled with love and comfort, and not with whatever scary things that are upsetting them.

Photo by Mehmet Goren.

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