Can 18 month olds have nightmares - and what do do about them

[yellowflowers]

dd has woken the past two nights very upset with no obvious reasons. Actually I say woken but her eyes are closed the whole time. She's calmed down once I've managed to wake her and she's looked around the room and both times clearly wanted to go back to sleep. Could this be nightmares? And what to do about them?

It sounds like night frights to be honest from what i have read, see if there is a pattern, ie like the same sort of time she wakes up like it, and then ten minutes before she would normally have one gently wake her up and then let her go back to sleep as this will hopeully break her dream pattern.

18month olds can have nightmares, my son did from what he had seen,but is now settled again. and feels safe here.

I hope your little girl doesnt have any more night mares.

agree with pp sounds like night terrors. These are more common when LO is overtired - what does her daytime routine look like atm?

As for what to do have a read of this

thank you - that's a really helpful link omama. Her routine hasn;t changed except she is at nursery two days a week and comes home knackered, but lately she's been waking at 5am and won;t go back to sleep so even though on those days she has a very long nap and earlier than usual, she is pretty tired.

Do you want to post her routine atm?

My DS has been a chronic early waker & I have to say the think I have found time & time again is that offering a long & early nap can just reinforce it & keep you in the early waking cycle. The only thing that's every fixed our EW is to push his nap later, and once we got past 18 months we had to start capping the nap.

Ds2 had a night terror for the first time last night. Awful, awful thing. I was in bits and ds1 was really upset because of the way ds2 was screaming!

He is an early riser, usually 5:30-6ish, usually naps around 1030am ish and goes to bed around 7. Although yesterday he woke at 4! Had a little feed and went back down until 730am, but wouldn't nap and didn't settle until 8ish. Do you think this could have caused it?

He's nearly 19mo btw. (on Thursday)