Night terrors or nightmares

For the last few months most nights, Little T has woke around the same time. Sometimes we hear him whimpering. Other times he comes downstairs. On the nights he comes down the stairs he moves like a ninja, you don't hear a thing; not a creak of the floor boards or a clank of the safety gate. He appears in the living room; sweat soaking his hair, eyes wide and shaking. He startles me every time. We know straight away he has had a bad dream, we try to comfort him till he stops shaking and wait for him to settle. He is aware he has had a bad dream but can not remember what it was about. 

I looked up night terrors and discovered he is with the correct age bracket, however the symptoms are:

• Screaming
• Thrashing about in a panic
• Shouting
• Eyes open but not awake
• Jumping out of bed

Now he does do some of them but he does not seem to be asleep when he comes down the stairs, he just seems scared.

Nightmares usually stop at age 6, they are also usually caused by the child watching something scary and Little T does not watch much that is scary.

What ever it is it must be worrying him as he asked my mother in law to buy him a dream catcher. He must have spoken to my mother in law about dream catchers after seeing one in my husbands bedroom at her house a few years ago. She agreed to buy him one and it arrived a few days ago.

My husband placed the dream catcher right above his bed. Now I don't know if it is psychologically working or if the legend of dream catchers are true. I like to believe in the latter. Since it has been above his bed he has not had one nightmare. He came downstairs on the first night and said he could not sleep, there was no wide eyes are shaking to go with it though. My husband had a dream catcher above his bed, it was one of the first things I noticed when I walked into his bedroom. He had been bought it as a gift and the funny thing is, he never dreams. Well he must dream but he never remembers having a dream.

So I looked into the history of dream catchers. I found that native Americans believe that come night time the air is filled with bad and good dreams. The dream catchers were made to allow the good dreams to pass through the holes and run down the feathers into the person sleeping below, they can land so softly onto the sleeping person that they don't recall having a dream. The bad dreams are caught up in the web, when the sun rises on a new day they vanish.

I think at some point I will try to make a dream catcher. Whilst searching for a tutorial I found Sea Lemon on YouTube who has created a fantastic dream catcher tutorial go over and check her out.