Dreamcatching : Every Parent's Guide to Exploring and Understanding Children's Dreams and Nightmares - Softcover

Bulkeley, Kelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0517887886 ISBN 13: 9780517887882

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 1998

Synopsis

Explains how children's dreams can reveal the hopes and fears they are unable to express, and tells how parents can use their children's dreams to nurture their creative and problem-solving abilities

About this title

Review

Dreamcatching, by Alan Siegel, clinical psychologist (Dreams That Can Change Your Life), and Kelly Bulkeley, dream researcher (The Wilderness of Dreams), is for parents who are interested in finding out what their children dream about. Through dreams, parents may gain a deeper understanding of what a child is thinking, feeling, and needing. (A child, for instance, with recurrent dreams of being naked in public may be feeling self-conscious and may require special sensitivity when she's in a public situation.) Siegel and Bulkeley have suggestions for helping even very young children remember their dreams and for gaining insight into a child's dreams and nightmares by relating them to the child's waking experiences. They discuss common dream themes and ways to talk with your child about their dreams (don't over analyze, at least in front of them). They also provide an approach to nightmares: "Nightmares are more often like a vaccine than a poison ... a minute dose of a disease that mobilizes our antibodies and makes us more resistant to the virulence of the disease." Siegel and Bulkeley believe that your response can break the cycle of nightmares. Wonderful dreams from real children throughout the book enhance its worth.

From Booklist

Discussing dreams is an unusual but effective means of creative and emotional contact with children. Ranging from expressing dream images through writing and art to soothing fears to finding solutions to problems, dream-work techniques afford opportunities to connect and to guide development and well-being very personally. Siegel and Bulkeley teach parents about common themes in children's dreams according to age, remedies for nightmares, dreaming in response to family crises or change, and themes of transcendence and spirituality in dreams. They illustrate each topic with dozens of actual dreams--some brief, some elaborate, all fascinating as means of describing, clarifying, or explaining the concerns of an individual child. The book also offers a teacher's guide to creative dream work in the classroom, an annotated bibliography of children's books addressing dreams and dreaming, and instructions on compiling a "dreamcatcher" workbook. Many parents may welcome this insightful approach to sharing and understanding one of life's universal experiences with their children. Kathryn Carpenter

Edition details

• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0517887886
• ISBN 13: 9780517887882
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290