more about dreams

You've probably heard people say that you shouldn't wake kids up when they're in the middle of a nightmare. People say this because they are stupid.

The usual reason given is that kids need to work through dreams themselves, or some such crap; apparently, if you wake them up you interrupt the child's process of resolving the nightmare on their own.

As if nightmares resolve themselves. As if someone did a study where they waited till kids had nightmares, and then woke up half of them in the middle and let half of them sleep, and kept track of how many turned out to be Jeffrey Dahmer.

I *can* see how someone came up with this: we probably have a certain number of nightmares that we don't remember the next day, so someone said "Hey, if we dont' wake up in the middle, we're happier because we don't remember the nightmare in the morning!" And from there was born the idea the waking people up from a nightmare is bad.

But I can tell you I've had plenty of nightmares I wish someone had woken me up from. I see absolutely no value in letting a child cry and sweat and thrash and whimper in fear when by waking them up you can
a) stop the nightmare, and
b) offer comfort.

I don't believe that nightmares "resolve themselves". I think it's unhealthy for any number of reasons to let sleep be a time of fear for kids. I think the sooner you can stop a nightmare and replace it with hugs, the better.

Any other opinion on this subject is of no value. ;-)