My oldest son now 7 used to have really bad nightmares on a regular basis.  I would monitor his television programs and be careful what kind of books I read to him, but it didn’t do much good.

I would try to get him to recall his dreams so maybe I could pin point the problem but he was either too scared to repeat it or he just couldn’t remember.  Finally, about two years ago we found out that he was afraid of his closet and he thought monsters were in there.  So, we put a poem on his wall beside his bed where he could see it.  If he woke up from a nightmare he would repeat this poem until the nightmare went away.  It was a simple one that went like this: See my fingers, see my thumb, see my fist, you better run, MONSTERS GET OUT OF MY CLOSET!  This worked really well for about a year.

Now I needed to come up with something even better.  I remembered reading about mind chatter and how to control it through discomfort. Basically when you have a discouraging or non-productive thought you would snap an elastic band on your wrist.  How this works is eventually your brain associates bad or unproductive thoughts with discomfort or pain and to protect you from this discomfort you eventually stop the negative thought patterns.  So I thought I would try it with my son.  I gave him a loose fitting purple elastic band that he wore on his wrist and when he woke up scared from a bad dream he would snap his wrist and say Go Away Bad Dreams!  He would have to do it a number of times each nightmare to make the scary feeling and visual go away. 

I am very happy to say that he doesn’t even need to wear the band anymore and he hasn’t had a nightmare in very long time or if he has he just goes back to sleep and doesn’t recall it in the morning.