Suggestions for getting 3 yr old DD back to sleep after a nightmare - awake for 2 hours last night.

[onehitwonder]

Hi

In the last 7 days DD has woken up twice in the middle of the night crying/screaming. I am pretty sure it is bad dreams. The first time I gave her a cuddle tried to settle her and went back to bed, but she was shouting for me again after 5 mins. This went on for about 45 mins and eventually I read her a story and did our bedtime routine again, and she settled.
Last night she woke screaming at about 3am. She was really upset, so this time I let her get into bed with me (and DH went off to her room). She laid quiet and still, but after over an hours still wasn't asleep, and neither was I. Eventually got DH to take her back to her bed and he said in her room with her, but still took her over 1/2 hour to drop of.
Result - DH overslept and is late for work. My morning sickness is worse (am 7 weeks pg).
Any suggestions for best way to settle her back to sleep?

No suggestions i'm afraid but iwill be watching this thread with interest as we are having the same problem.
I'm finding it exhausting as i'm pg as well (28 weeks).
Come on the MN Boffins tell us what to do please.
Oh and the dreams happen at different times through the night.

My dd used to have nightmares. What worked for us was to get her out of her room as fast as possible and into the living room and make sure she was really, properly awake before trying to get her back to sleep. We found that if we tried to settle her in her room it was too full of "panicky vibrations" for her to settle and it took ages. Whisking her out to a brightly lit living room, some cheerful chat and a glass of milk and she was asleep again much more quickly. Hope it works for you.

ha ha just re-read my original post and noticed all the typos. Yet another result of the disturbed night

My DD1 suffered with this when she started full time nursery. We didn't cure the nightmares but here are a few things that helped and that she found comforting.

• we gave her a 'bad dream fairy,' and told her she makes bad dreams go away at night.
• our bedtime bad dreams routine included 'hoovering' the bad dreams away (sometimes I used it as an opportunity to put the hoover round for real)
• a night light stopped her feeling disorientated in the night

-also talk to her. I know it's difficult to get much sense out of a three-year-old when it come to these things, but some reassurance and lots of cuddles might help. -remember that it's just a phase

HI, new to this so not caught on to what dd etc means but my nearly 3 yr old is going through the bad dreams phase at the mo, thankfully he seems to calm down with lots of cuddles and reassurance. also thankfully it hasn't been waking up my second who is 12 weeks, hopefully the bad dreams phase will stop before baby goes in with him when hes 6 months!

Both of our dc used to have nightmares and when we'd calmed them down - with a cuddle and talking soothingly and letting them tell us the details if they wanted to - we used to take them to the loo. We said that sometimes bad dreams were our bodies' way of waking us up if we needed a wee. They always managed to do an impressive wee (in the middle of the night, nice full bladder!) and would settle down calmly afterwards. The nightmares became less and less frequent but when they happened the dc themselves would say - I must need a wee! and recover much more quickly. It worked from the age they started potty training, and they didn't have nightmares before then anyway.

Maybe our dc are weirdly auto-suggestible to take to this notion so happily, but we wanted to avoid night-lights and scaring away the evil things routines or anything else that might become too much of a ritual and too hard to break.