When Bad Dreams Return: How to Help Your Child Sleep Peacefully Again

If like many parents, you're wondering what to do when your children wake up from a bad dream, the following suggestions will offer much more than just a piece of advice. You’ll find insight into the source of dreams and powerful NLP-based techniques that can provide your child with immediate comfort and help ensure a long, peaceful night’s sleep.

What Are Dreams, Really?

Dreams serve as a tool to process the emotional experiences and events of the day. Dreams are born of imagination from the subconscious mind.

Throughout the day, children encounter countless situations, many of which are not fully processed on an emotional level. These unresolved experiences get pushed into the subconscious, and at night, through dreams, the brain tries to revisit and process them.

Dreaming allows the mind to heal, by re-presenting a situation, working through it, and attempting to “resolve” it.

Any external stimulus that the child didn’t fully emotionally respond to during the day may appear at night in the form of a dream.

Freud’s View: Two Sources of Dreams

Freud believed that dreams arise from two main sources:

1. Daily residue – leftover thoughts and experiences from the day.

2. Past memories – sometimes deeply buried in the subconscious.

Both are hidden from our conscious awareness.

What to Do About Scary Dreams and Nightmares

Children often experience nightmares involving things they fear such as wild animals, scary figures, getting lost, losing a parent, or something bad happening to them or someone they love.

These frightening dreams often reflect what the child’s subconscious is still struggling to process. At times, even a child’s conscious fears will show up in dreams- creating fearful stories accompanied by very real emotional reactions.

It's important to strengthen the child’s sense of self, and provide them with the feeling of safety. When a child feels safe and surrounded by love, those fears remain in the subconscious and often express themselves in dreams.

How NLP Can Help: Rewriting the Internal Experience

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) researchers found that an internal experience can create a memory in the brain that is just as strong as a real-life experience. Reimagining a frightening experience can change how it’s stored in memory- this is a core principle of NLP.

In the case of a nightmare: When the child wakes up, you can guide them to reimagine the scary parts of the dream and change the way they appear in the mind. This process creates a new internal memory that replaces the old, frightening one.

Here are some ways to help them reshape the dream:

• Change the sound: Make the scary voice soft and gentle.

• Shrink the scary figure: Imagine it changing from big and powerful to tiny and weak.

• Change the clothing: Visualize the figure in bright, soft, funny clothes.

• Make the face silly or happy: Add a big smile or cartoonish features.

• Turn the image black and white: This signals to the brain that it’s an old, outdated memory.

• Pause the motion: If there was movement in the dream, imagine freezing it.

• Bring in a protector: Imagine someone comforting, such as Mom, Grandpa, or a beloved spiritual figure standing next to them.

• Rewrite the ending: Help the child create a new, positive ending to the dream that leaves them feeling strong and safe.

All of these techniques help the brain reframe the dream. Since the brain stores the last version of a memory it processes, this updated image will bring relief and calm.

Extra Tips to Prevent Scary Dreams

1. Avoid frightening content before bed
   Don’t allow your child to watch violent or scary movies. These are prime material for the subconscious, and will almost certainly appear in dreams during early sleep stages.

2. Keep the bedroom warm
   Studies show a direct link between sleeping in a cold room and nightmares. The body reacts to cold with shivering and discomfort, which can trigger subconscious associations with fear and anxiety.

3. Support “Alpha Waves” before sleep
   Just before falling asleep, the brain enters a phase called Alpha state- a transition between full awareness and sleep. This is a state of deep relaxation and healing. Helping your child maintain this calm state (no screens, a soothing bedtime routine, a gentle voice) directly influences their thoughts and dreams.

4. Talk through the day with your child
   Because dreams often arise from unprocessed emotions, one of the best things you can do is simply talk with your child. Help them process their day, their feelings, their fears. The more they work through during the day, the less their subconscious will need to resolve at night.

Understanding the source of your child’s dreams and learning how to respond with calm, creative tools can transform both your nights and theirs.

With love, presence, and a little imagination, you can give them the sense of safety needed to drift off again, and sleep soundly until morning.

Sweet dreams!

​Inbal Elhayani, M.A., is a certified NLP practitioner and a guided imagery therapist, writer, and lecturer.