Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Dreamguider: Open the Door to your Child’s Dreams
Denyse Beaudet, PhD
ISBN: 1571745939
Have you ever wondered what the dreams of your children (or those of others) means? Or have you thought about the value of encouraging children to remember and share their dreams? If so, Denyse Beaudet’s new book, Dreamguider, is for you.
Written in an easy-to-read style, Dr. Beaudet takes us through the developmental stages of childhood and shares the types of dreams common to each, along with the beliefs children have about their dreams and where they come from, including whether dreams are inside or outside of themselves.
Many adults rarely think about dreams as anything other than oddities of the night, yet, to our children, dreams are so real as to often be indistinguishable from waking reality. Dr. Beaudet offers a series of activities, from helping a child establish a dream journal to creating nighttime rituals aimed at encouraging restful and relaxed sleep, which will allow both parents/adult friends and child to enter into a journey where dreams can be a source of learning, challenges faced constructively, and dream experiences enjoyed rather than feared.
Integrating dream life with waking life not only helps to validate both, but assists us in connecting with our creativity and deeper selves. Helping a child to understand and value the gifts that dream awareness can bring aids in their maturation process in a way that creates greater bonds between parent and child.
This book is rich with perspective, advice, and engaging activities which can be used by any adult who has caregiving relationships with children to foster a fearless and rich connection with dreams.
Tags: children's dreams, Denyse Beaudet
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Monday, October 12th, 2009
The Dreamer’s Companion
by Stephen Policoff
Chicago Review Press
The Dreamer’s Companion: A Young Person’s Guide to Understanding Your Dreams and Using Them Creatively, is aimed at young people, for whom little has been written on the subject; it touches upon many different aspects of dreamlore–a little dream anthropology, some contemporary theories, ideas on dream recall and dream sharing. It has a lengthy section on dreams and creativity, a common sense guide to understanding your dreams, and much more. The book emerged from the author’s use of dreams to teach writing at NYU, where he is Master Teacher of Writing, and also Wesleyan University, where he was for many years director of the writing program at the Center for Creative Youth. Possibly the most unique feature of this book is that it quotes 50 of his former students (most of them 15-20, a few somewhat older), on their own experiences with nightmares, psychic dreaming, and attempts to wrest illumination from the dark and tangled scenarios of their unconscious.
Tags: children's dreams, Creativity, Dreamer's Companion, Stephen Policoff
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Steve Mobia has come up with a proposal for a dream television show for children, called Dreamtree (oddly enough, this title came into his psyche in 1980, 15 years before our online Dream Tree was born). Steve Mobia has studied much of the literature on dreams and has a working knowledge of a variety of dream analysis techniques, including those described by Fritz Perls (the "Gestalt" system), Carl Jung (" Active Imagination"), Sigmund Freud ("Free Association") and Calvin Hall ("Content Analysis"). He has a keen interest in current sleep research, especially the work being done on "lucid dreaming" by Dr. Stephen LaBerge at the Stanford University Sleep Lab. Steve Mobia’s decision to develop Dreamtree came from a realization that even though much fantasy material is presented to children, little effort is made to stimulate the innate creativity of a child — a creativity beautifully epitomized in dreams. This material is © Steve Mobia and is published with the author’s permission.
DREAMTREE
A Dream Show for children
By Steve Mobia
Many a parent is at a loss when their child excitedly tells them a recent dream. Most of us are not trained to understand or make use of this unique mental state. As a result, children are left alone with this often-frightening unknown realm, which they may eventually suppress along with other gifts of childhood.
Most of a child’s education develops logical objective thinking. Dreamtree is intended to fill an important need in education: imaginative subjective thinking. The episodes, for children ages 7-12, will illustrate ways the mind transforms waking experience into the vivid emotional pictures we call dreams. By gaining familiarity with the ways dreams function, children will learn to overcome fears, develop a creative approach to problems and discover new communication skills.
The show will emerge out of improvisational sessions using the actual dreams of the participants. Through a combination of evocative sets, masks, lighting and suggestion, a fascinating dreamscape will be presented. Parents watching the show will acquire a deeper appreciation of their children’s inner world and may experience a resurgence of interest in their own dreams.
(more…)
Tags: children's dreams, dream t.v., Steve Mobia, television
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Dreamcatching: Every Parents Guide to Understanding and Exploring Children’s Dreams and Nightmares
by Alan Siegel and Kelly Bulkeley
Random House: Three Rivers
Press ISBN: 0517-88788-6
Dreamcatching is a practical and highly entertaining book that offers parents a user-friendly guide to the landscape of their children’s dreams and nightmares. Written by two renowned dream researchers and educators, this book uses more than 100 vivid dreams as examples to show parents how family dream-sharing can stimulate their children’s creative and emotional intelligence and enhance family communication. Exploring dreams can also help parents detect troubling anxieties and strengthen their children’s emotional resilience to meet life’s challenges and crises. Emphasizing creative approaches to exploring children’s dreams, Dreamcatching goes far beyond a simple how-to book and addresses broader issues such as creativity, child development, spirituality, violence in the media and society and more concrete issues such as nightmares and sleep disorders, and helping children recover from the psychological impact of grief, trauma and transitions. No other book gives parents such a trustworthy and psychologically sound introduction to the creativity and wisdom found in their children’s dreams. Some of the intriguing and useful learning experiences in Dreamcatcher include: · Understanding Common Dream Symbols such as Flying, Falling, Being Chased, Public Nudity, Failing Exams, Animals and Monsters. Find your family and your child’s personal meanings for common and recurring dreams. · Nightmare Remedies: How you can helping your child tame the demons of the night including monster and chase dreams, night terrors, recurring nightmares. Learn playful but effective techniques for overcoming nightmares and soothing the worries that go with them. · The Playful Creativity of Children’s Dreams: How dreams can be keys to opening children’s imagination and affirming their inner creativity. · First Aid for Crisis Dreams: Understanding and responding to children’s dreams following divorce, natural disasters, accidents, loss and grief, the birth or adoption of a sibling. · Dreams and the Spiritual Life of Children: Learn how dream sharing can help children become aware of their spirituality. A workbook, with step-by-step instructions for families on remembering and exploring dreams through many forms of drawing, painting, journal and story writing, drama and group and dream exhibits and fairs-complete with forms for keeping a dream catcher’s journal. For more information, please contact the authors: Alan Siegel, Ph.D.: 2607 Alcatraz Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705. (510) 527 7929, email: Dreamsdr@aol.com or Kelly Bulkeley Ph.D., 226 Amherst Avenue, Kensington CA 94707 (510) 528 0226, email 76633.1555@compuserve.com, or visit the website at www.dreamcatching.com.
Tags: Alan Siegel, book review, children's dreams, Dreamcatching, Kelly bulkeley, nightmares
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