Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Nightmares

Ashley has been plagued by nightmares every night for the past week or so. They are vivid enough that she can recall in detail when she wants to. Most nights, she won't tell us what they are about, they scare her that much.

What this means is her sleep has been interrupted repeatedly. There was one morning where she was up for the day at 4:45am. There have been nights where I have laid on the floor beside her bed, there have been nights she has begged to come to our bed. Considering we already have a certain three year old occupying our bed at that time, we try to comfort her by rubbing her back, turning on her ceiling fan, consoling her.

Tonight, we tried something new. I told her, kind of jokingly, that we needed to cleanse her room. This comes from watching the Exorcist too many times. She latched onto the idea, and I told her I had special spray I could use to cleanse her room. We even ran into our next door neighbor, the one with the most Halloween decorations on our street, and I casually mentioned Ashley's sleep troubles. She told Ashley that the special spray would most definitely work. She had used it many times on her kids.

So into the house we went. I found some random bottle of Febreze under my sink, and all of us traipsed upstairs. I told them I needed to do the cleanse alone, in the dark, just to add to the effect. So I went into her room and shut the door. I sprayed the special spray, which actually made the room smell somewhat better, and left, closing the door behind me. I told Ashley that it needed a few minutes to set in. Of course Audrey demanded her room to be cleansed, so I did hers as well.

And now Ashley is asleep. Last night, the nightmares hit about 11:30pm. I am keeping my fingers crossed this worked.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of my sons was experienced real fear around bedtime. It's like everything he dealt with during the day swooped down and like a bunch of buzzards, just tormented him. It was exasperating. What a great solution! We discussed fear and courage, using biblical heroes who faced their fears. We did this at bedtime. It's something that worked for us! But, whew! It was hard for awhile!

I hope it works!

Bethany said...

I'll keep my fingers crossed too. I hate when the kids have nightmares and it's awful when they are frequent.

Good luck.

SJINCO said...

I might have to try this on Isaac! He wakes up like clockwork almost every single night about an hour and a half to two hours after he goes down for the night. I can only assume they are nightmares that are waking him.

Last night it was a ghost of (of all things) a bird. Weird.

Pamela said...

a little prayer for her crossing my lips right now. Poor baby.