Blog: Children’s Dreams - Invoking Dreams & the Process of Going to Sleep
How does one make a night good? How do we move from what we experienced during the day into a truly restful sleep? What is night’s purpose? How many of you have woken in the night to your children’s piercing screams caused by their nightmares? Do children dream?
“I don’t want to go to sleep!” So begins the exhausting process until the awaited phrase “Good night!” We breathe a sigh of relief and drop down on the couch. Bedtime and the ritual before going to sleep are decisive in determining the mental health of our children. How we end the day directly affects how the night will be and how the next day will be as well. Many children have trouble letting go and going to sleep. Maybe they are not tired? Could it be that they have an unrecognized fear of the world of dreams or of the appearance of a scary monster?
The transition from all that we go through during the day into the night is a passage from one reality to another. If it is done successfully, it promotes growth and flourishing, while an abrupt and incorrect transition delays or constrains.
There are different theories about dreams and various approaches to the issue but they all agree on one thing, a dream is an expression of the dreamer’s inner world. If this is true, can we as parents be connected with our children’s dreams and thus be connected to their deepest inner world?
Dreamy the Pillow is a pillow with a pocket in which there is a book: “Dreamy the Pillow”. Dreamy helps children who have trouble falling asleep because of things that they experienced during the day. She takes them to the land of dreams. There they help someone with a problem similar to their own and by doing so they help themselves. At the end of the book, Dreamy invites every boy and girl to write about or draw the dream of his choice, to put it into the pocket on the pillow, and then to go to sleep. Dreamy invites the children to use paper included with the pillow to call up a dream before going to sleep.
The pillow and the book deal with the topic of dreams in a deep and magical way. They offer parent and child an emotional and personal separation ritual through which they part from the daytime world of experience, activity, and enter the nighttime world of dreams. The pre-sleep dialog between child and parent brings them close. This is an opportunity to sum up the day and, for the parent, to close the gap. Thinking about the day is an organizing process for the child that allows him to relax. Out of the content and significance revealed in the hour before sleep, it is possible to call forth a dream. The last hour of the day creates an intimacy with the child, especially for a parent who has not seen his child throughout the day.
How does one invite a dream? Which of the experiences that your child has gone through during the day is occupying him at the moment? What does he most need now? What is he feeling? What does he want? The child summarizes and analyzes all that happened during the day in the moment before sleep and draws it all on paper.
Expressing the child’s inner world through drawing makes possible a connection to the child’s emotional inner space. The drawing brings out this content on paper so that it is possible to see and connect with it. This is the main principle of art therapy. The child puts the paper with the invited dream into the pocket and the dream pillow holds on to it and watches over it. The dream pillow is a gateway into the mysterious world of dreams and allows the child to get in touch with that world for the first time. Encountering the world of dreams can some times be frightening and confusing, even for adults. The transition from day to night is hard for a child because it is a transition from a state of control to one of lack of control. Sometimes while dreaming, we process what we did not get a chance to during the day. A dream doesn’t always have an explanation but we have one every night, even if we don’t remember it. It is an inner place that we have almost no contact with. We ask questions and ask for answers from a place within us that we don’t always dare to be in touch with. We connect with the powers inside us that know how to and enable us to cope. For children, the difference between reality and imagination is not so clear and so it is frightening to go there. The pillow acts as a mediator to the unknown and to reach their internal space. It enables them to learn the power of their mind.
In this case, the dream pillow serves as a mediator and provides some feeling of control through the ritual of calling forth a dream. It holds the children’s wishes and needs. The connection between the request and what is received is not always clear. The value actually lies in the invitation to dialog and the search for significance behind the things that appear. The pillow's soft and pleasant form invites a sensual connection, to touch it, to sink into it. It creates intimacy. Its flexibility symbolizes something to the child as it can absorb his entire weight, and will always go back to its original form like a sponge that absorbs and contains everything…
Five-year-old Zohar drew a picture of four magicians on the dream invitation paper -- her mother, father, her sister, and herself, and asked that the whole family be turned into a family of magicians. At night she dreamt that she was going on a trip with the children from preschool. Everyone got off the bus and Zohar stayed locked in the bus by herself. In the dream, she raises her hands and whispers a magic spell that makes her fly out of the locked bus. Zohar actually invoked in advance the strength that would save her from a situation with no way out.
Six-year-old Eden asked for a dream about an eagle and drew it on paper. At night, she dreamt about a white eagle and a black eagle that were arguing with each other. The next day, Eden asked her mother which is stronger. The black one or the white one? And which one wins? Earlier, during that evening, the mother and father had argued in the living room while Eden was still awake. She invited only one eagle but dreamt about two that were in conflict. The argument that the mother and father had seems to have bothered Eden and so she dreamt about the argument between the two eagles. Eden summoned an eagle as a symbol of power -- king of the birds. The invitation of a single eagle could represent Eden’s desire for parental unity.
The children who use the pillow have trouble parting with their dream pictures and guard them like treasure. Some of them hang them on the wall in their room and some later bind them into a book. It was hard to obtain the drawings for this article because the children refuse to part with them. Maybe because it means parting from a very important part of themselves. There are various ways to use the pillow and every child and parent find their own way to work with it.
The pillow is also an important element in the bond between the child and the parent. Because the ritual of invoking the dream is done together with the parent, the parent gets in touch with that deep place where the child is at the moment before sleep and separation. Together, they deposit the expression of this place into the pillow, and the pillow carries it within itself. In this way, the pillow serves as a transitional object for the mysterious journey into the night and allows the child to go on this journey with something that protects and mediates. The following day, the child shares his dream with the parent. This creates continuity of the joint journey which now becomes an introduction and strengthening for the journey during the rest of the day.
Like the soft and pleasant touch of the pillow, so too the magic moment of unity with the child before sleep carries within it an array of opportunities for development and growth. The contact with the emotions and the internal world, the connection and closeness of our child above all with himself creates a healthy personality that can communicate and truly touch everyone and everything in its world.