My 3 year old dd is having bad dreams

[MrsFreedy]

My 3 year old dd often has bad dreams in the latter part of the night about animals trying to eat her. She then comes into our bed for a cuddle. I take her back to her bed and tell the animals to go away and leave her alone. In the morning I ask her if there is anything wrong and she says no. She has cuddly animals, been to farms etc etc and also watches 64 Zoo Lane but that does not scare her, last night we didn't watch it. I was wondering if there is a sleep expert who could tell me what the meaning of the dreams are.

My dd went through a phase of bad pigeons trying to eat her (god knows where that came from...). In the end, I don't think she was actually scared of pigeons, I think she was unsettled about other stuff going on in her life. Talking to her about it helped I think, and letting her be afraid too (ie: don't just rubbish her fears). Like you, we talked about saying "Go away silly pigeon!" when she was dreaming etc.
I think in the end, letting her have a small night light on while she slept helped. We also used some bach flower remedy drops for nightmares (will look up which ones and post link...)
Hope that helps!

here is the link to the whole page. You need to scroll down to the bottom to get the symptoms and remedies....

Can you give her a mechanism to get rid of the animals herself? We hung a fairy over dd's bed and told her that the fairy was her special dream fairy and would protect her against anything she saw in a dream. It seemed to work for us.

Also have a friend whose dd started to have night terrors at a similar age to your dd. Friend stopped giving her dd milk at bedtime and the nightmares went.

Sorry for not getting back earlier and thanks for the info and ideas. As she does not have the bad dreams regularly I am going to wait until the next time she has one, speak to her about it in the morning and together we will make one of her soft toys her protector. Personally, I think she only has them when she is worried about something but does not want to tell me.

My 3 year old DS kept us up all last night because he said he was scared of the flies in his bedroom. We just thought it was a bad dream and that he was being silly, then we realised that there were two moths flying around his night light!!