5 year old with frequent nightmares - any tips?

[tonton]

I posted this on sleep but thought I'd try here as well.
dd is 5 and has been having nightmares for about 3 years. I's very ditressing the first tinme anyone sees her like this - she is quite hysterical and though she is awake enough to call for us or to attract out attention (through screaming) she still 'sees things' in the room and often doesn't calm down for 20 minutes or more. My apporach has been to sit with her maybe on my lap and try to keep in her line of sight and just talk gently and reassuringly to her, telling her 'I'm here' and 'it's over now'. I used to always turn on the light to try and wake her more quickly but I'm not doing that so muhc now. Any thoughts/experiences?

my sister gave my nephew a bright red cell blanket and told him it was a Dream Shield. Good dreams can come into him through the tiny holes, but bad dreams can only get through big holes so the Dream Shield keeps them out.

He only started having nightmares when he went to scholl though.

My dd 4 is going through this now, so we got her a bear pooh bear at xmas and said that he was special and that he keeps bad dreams away and he will watch over her everynight.......seems to be doing the trick...(also helps if you don't show them the label coz we made it up but it has worked.)

could they be night terrors?

Something similar to Highlander's nephew is a dreamcatcher which worked on DD for some time. She did exactly the same as your DD tonton when she younger, was sort of hallucinating a giant bee in her room coming out of her rug for an hour and was so scared she wet herself. Her nursery suggested a dreamcatcher and the leader explained to DD that her daughter used to have nightmares when she was little but they stopped when she got a dream catcher.

Hobbycraft do a kit which we made. The dreams get caught in the web and the bad ones are destroyed by the moon and the stars, leaving only the good ones to slide out down the ribbon. Every so often it needed new feathers to keep it's magical powers going. Then when it stopped working we found a stained glass thing with a sucker that is stuck on the window and is one of the most powerful dreamcatchers you can have. Again, not a single nightmare since that's been on her window.

I had night terrors when i was young and my mom swears by this:
Take her to the toilet and get her to pee.

Thaks for the tips. I'll try a dream-catcher and I'll try the visit to the loo! I should probably googler 'night terrors' - don't reallly know what they are.