Bedtime Stories for Kids Who Have Nightmares
By the time a child is crying, the nightmare is already over. That’s the part that catches parents out: the reassurance on offer is about the dream, and the dream has finished. What the child is actually facing is the next bit — lying down again, in the same dark, in the same head, having just watched that head produce something like that. “It wasn’t real” is a fact about the past. What helps is something to do next: a few plain words for what happened, a look round a room that turns out to be only a room, the cold side of the pillow.
Below is a complete story you can read aloud tonight, free — including at two in the morning, which is when it tends to be wanted. When you want the version with your own child’s name in it, that takes about thirty seconds to make.
Noor and the Second Half of the Night
A free story to read aloud tonight
The clock in the hall had said something with a two in it, and Noor was sitting bolt upright in a bed gone warm and wrong, with the landing light laying its long yellow stripe across the floor.
On the windowsill, a moth the colour of an old envelope was folding itself up without hurrying. “Bad one?” said the moth, whose name was Pell. “They do sound terribly sure of themselves at this hour.”
The trouble was not the dog made out of smoke. The dog was finished. The trouble was the other side of sleep, which was where the dog lived, and which Noor was expected to climb back into as though nothing had happened.
So she said it out loud, in the ordinary voice she used for ordinary facts. “There was a dog made of smoke and it knew my name.” It took four seconds to say. It had felt like most of a year.
“Four seconds,” said Pell, unimpressed, and went along the sill naming what was in the room instead: one chair, one dressing gown pretending to be a person, one glass of water, one girl. Noor turned the pillow over to the cold side, which is a small thing, and helps.
Then the landing light stayed on the way it always did, and the moth settled into the corner of the window like a folded paper receipt, and Noor lay down into the second half of the night — which turned out to be a completely different night, with nothing in it at all. She was asleep before the clock got to the next number.
What’s the difference between a nightmare and a night terror?
Parents commonly describe nightmares as something the child wakes from and can tell you about afterwards, often in the second half of the night. Night terrors tend to look far more dramatic — sitting up, shouting, eyes open — while the child stays asleep and remembers nothing by morning. The two are usually handled quite differently, so if you’re unsure which you’re seeing, or they happen often, your pediatrician is the right person to ask.
Should I let my child sleep in our bed after a nightmare?
Families differ, and both approaches work in different households. Some parents find a firm, boring, unexciting return to the child’s own bed — with them staying a few minutes — settles things faster over a week or two. Others would rather everyone got some sleep tonight and worried about the habit later. Neither is a mistake. What seems to matter more is that the response is the same every time.
Is it a bad idea to talk about the dream in the middle of the night?
A short version usually helps more than a long one. Many parents find that letting the child say what happened in a few plain words takes the strangeness out of it, while a detailed retelling at two in the morning wakes everybody up properly and makes going back to sleep harder than it needs to be. The longer conversation, if they want one, keeps until breakfast.