4 year old sleeping badly

Ciarrai76

Our 4 year old has started to sleep really badly for the past 6 weeks. He seems to have a pattern now of screaming for me about an hour & half - 2 hours after he falls asleep. It’s almost like clockwork. He isn’t awake though, although sometimes his eyes are open. He seems quite scared and freaked out but lies back down when I go to him and most of the time goes back to sleep. He is waking again a few hours later and won’t lie back down and a lot of times I end up just letting him sleep with me as he will not go back to his own bed.

One main thing I am putting it down to is an incident we had the eve of New Year’s Eve when our hot tank burst and we had a massive leak in middle of the night. It was on the landing, next to his room and obviously it woke us all and he was petrified at the time. He really hasn’t slept well since and despite all our explanations to him that it’s ok now, we have a new tank, we were luck not to have major damage etc, he seems to understand this, but still he wakes terrified and sleep is terrible. He was a pretty good sleeper before then.

We are not sure what to do to improve his sleep that we haven’t tried. Or is it a phase this age goes through with night terrors. I just don’t know!?

This sounds so familiar to our little boy!

He’s been having nightmares for the past while, I think by this age they’re finally able to article what they’re going through at night!

Similar to your situation, we have bad plumbing, the hot water tank is directly above his room and the pipes really play up when we put on a fire, couple that with the lack of normality of lockdown and then we had an antisocial incident that scared the life out of him, all these things add up!

I try to rationalize it with him, I gave him an ‘example’ of a bad dream I had the night before, I told him I woke up and realized it was only a dream and that I was being silly because I know it’s not true, I relaxed myself, relaxed my breathing and when I felt happy and safe I fell asleep again and if the dream happened again, I was in control and could make it happy etc. it has def worked for him as he can now see they’re not real and that he can control them when he becomes aware of them.

Other techniques that friends use is blowing on the pillow to blow the bad dreams away, mine would be too old for that one but it does work too!