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

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

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