style="font-size:15px;"> If I had not been able to throw Evan into the porch and myself after him, we would have been in serious trouble. At this point, my son was completely calm, staring out the window at the dogs as they vanished into the creek bed. He looked at me and said, “The dogs!” I said to him, “Yes, I got it.”
My son has shared his dreams, big and small, with me all his life — and still does, now that he is in his late thirties. I turned to him in my darkest moments when I was experiencing doubts about my ability to heal from a life-threatening illness. I asked him, “Am I okay? What are you dreaming?” I’ll never forget his response: “You are fine. I am dreaming you into the future.”
If you have any doubts about our ability to dream the future — and to use our night previews of possible future events to make better choices and change things for the better — listen to a young child telling his or her dreams. And consider how you may be required to recognize and act on clues to the possible future contained in the dream you are hearing. To put it mildly, children are not independent players on the stage of life. They need us not only to listen but to help.
I once led a dreamplay session for a group of at-risk inner-city kids in New Haven, Connecticut, hosted by the local Police Benevolent Association. A beautiful fourteen-year-old girl told a dream in which she gets off a bus on a winding mountain road and is attacked by two wild dogs with red eyes. The dogs didn’t sound like regular dogs, but the description of the rest stop on the mountain road was very literal and specific, though she said she’d never been to a place like that in regular life. We were lucky that day to have a counselor in the room who recognized the dream locale. “She has just described a rest stop on the road we’ll be taking to summer camp in a couple of weeks. I’ll be on that bus, and I promise you nothing bad is gonna happen at that stop, because I’ll be there to make sure of that.”
Helping Kids to Make a Secret Book
Luca had not yet turned four when he climbed into his mom’s bed in the middle of the night and told her the following dream:
I was running away from a huge T-Rex who was chasing me. Then I remembered, “Wait a minute, I like T-Rex.” So I turned around and told him, “Hey, you’re my favorite dinosaur!” And he picked me up so I could ride, and then we went to the beach together.
In the morning, Luca asked his mother to write the dream down for him. Luca did something inside his dream we all want to learn to do. Instead of running away from something scary, he turned around and faced it, on its own ground. Luca’s mom did the essential first thing that adults need to do with kids’ dreams: she listened. At Luca’s instigation, she then did the next most important thing: she helped her young child to do something fun with a dream, which in this case simply meant writing it down so the story would be a keeper.
Luca often told his dreams to his Aunt Chele, an active dreamer who had been keeping a dream journal for many years. Inspired by Aunt Chele’s example of writing her dreams in her journal, Luca’s mom provided Luca with the most special book any of us will ever have — a book filled with the magic of our dreams and imagination. If we are privileged to have access to young children, one of the greatest gifts we can give them — and in the process, ourselves — is to encourage them to record dreams and stories in a book that will become a journal. I did this with my own daughters. When they were very young, they would do the pictures and I would write the words for them. They took over more and more of the writing as they got older, until, at age nine, they were keeping their journals by themselves and for themselves. Then the same thing happened in each case. They said to me, in effect: “That’s it, Dad. This is my secret book, and you can’t read it anymore.”
Now that’s a journal. The secret book of your Self, not to be shared with anyone without permission, which should not be given lightly.
Nine Keys to Helping Kids with Their Dreams
Here’s what we need to know about listening to children’s dreams and supporting their imaginations:
1. Listen up! When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake.
2. Invite good dreams. Pick the right bedtime reading or, better still, tell stories. Help your child weave a web of good dream intentions for the night — for example, by asking, “What would you most like to do tonight?” Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian.
3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff. If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize that you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to clear out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible.
4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, the color of the sky, and exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there’s something about the future. Say what you would think about it if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call Grandma, and so on.
5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while she does the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, “This is my secret book, and you can’t read it anymore,” do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she’ll let you look in that magic book.
6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams alive through art, dance, theater, and games and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It’s such a release for kids to portray Mom or Dad or other grown-ups in their lives — be ready to be shocked!
7. Help construct effective action plans. Dreams can show us things that require further action — for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help. This will require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork, as you are doing now.
8. Let your own inner child out to play. As you listen to children’s dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play.
9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you’ll find it’s the best home entertainment you can enjoy.
Notice two things that are not on this list but that would be at the very top of a list of what not to do with a child’s dreams:
1. Never say to a child: “It’s only a dream.” Children know that dreams are for real, and that the scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.
2. Do NOT interpret a child’s dreams. You’re not the expert here; the child is.
