Sweet dreams are made of these...
Your child’s dreamscapes can be very complicated. Because of this, individual images within dreams can serve as a starting point for understanding their meaning. It’s important to bear in mind that your child’s dream may be influenced by a specific context (whether that’s bed-wetting, bullying, problems with siblings and so on). Therefore the following common symbols are only a guide.
Not only do such dream images give your child a sense of happiness but they can also indicate general levels of confidence and well-being. Exploring them can give you insight into what your child is feeling good about as well as being a springboard for creative play.
Flying or having other extraordinary powers
Images around these themes can symbolise your child going through a positive period of personal and emotional growth.
Discovering something such as buried treasure, special implement, or exotic item
Symbols such as these show that your child has just learned something new that he or she is pleased about whether that’s a particular skill or a new project.
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Scaling a mountain or a big wall with a positive and happy feeling
Your child is excelling at something, perhaps at school. He or she is rising to the challenge and gaining confidence.
Doing something in front of a classroom or peer group
Dream images where your child sings, speaks, or shows something to their class or peer group, accompanied by happy feelings, reveals a very positive, confident adjustment to that particular group.
Meeting their favourite sports or pop star
Dream images where the child gets to meet someone famous symbolises wish fulfilment. It’s a very straightforward emotional state: something they’d love to happen simply occurs in their dream.
Talking animals or family pets that act like companions
This demonstrates that your child feels very attached to, and gets comfort from, a household pet. Or if it’s not a pet, but is still a happy experience with a talking animal, it can symbolise a positive connection to nature.
And the nightmare scenarios...
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Gentle probing of bad dreams will give you important details about your child’s coping strategies — does your child freeze in the face of these threatening images, run from them or face them down? These, in turn, indicate how overwhelmed your child feels, or how prepared they feel to face things that worry them. Always use worrying dream symbolism or nightmarish images that your child reports as one piece in the puzzle of trying to work out what may be troubling them. It can be a starting point for open-ended questions around the subject matter of the symbols.
Monsters, ghosts and ghouls
Unlike nightmares of wild animals symbolising specific worries, images of monsters and ghosts tend to represent generalised anxieties. These anxieties can take the form of shyness, timidity and clinginess. Like these nightmare images, their feelings of anxiety are hard for a child to describe.
Being taunted by other children
Such images can symbolise actual bullying that your child is experiencing or a sense that they don’t fit in.
Raging fire or volcano
These may signify an explosive sense of fear and represent a new and frightening situation a child has been put into.
Wild animals on the loose
Lions, tigers, wolves and so on that roam around unfettered usually signify a specific anxiety-provoking situation. It may be the fear of a teacher or a bully and this fear takes the form of a wild animal.
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Falling off a high wall, from a building or a cliff
This can imply that your child feels unsupported at home over something she feels anxious about.
Getting lost in a jungle, wilderness, or other unknown territory
When a child has a nightmare containing such an unknown image it often symbolises the sense that she is completely lost with a situation. Often such nightmare images aren’t as frightening as others but are still unpleasant, often relating to things such as developing skills and academic achievement.