Whether you're 9 or 99, everyone has scary dreams. Most of us think of nightmares as an inevitable but unfortunate part of our sleeping life. What we're overlooking is the opportunity they offer to learn more about ourselves and to find creative solutions to problems affecting our waking hours.

The Nightmare Solution offers simple and creative ways to not only cope with our frightening dreams but to gain insight from them. By using techniques for capturing and communicating with the images in your dreams, you, your child, or any child you are advising can discover what our powerful dreams are really trying to tell us. Developed over many years by an art and dream therapist, these techniques have been successfully tested and refined on hundreds of students and clients.

Much of The Nightmare Solution is devoted to showing parents, therapists, and teachers how to work effectively with children struggling with nightmares. The simplicity and nonverbal core of the approach makes it especially effective for kids. All you need is paper, colored pens, and a willingness to listen and follow a child's thinking. Children learn to use their nightmares as alarm signals that can be put to creative use. They learn to understand their feelings, sharpen their problem-solving skills, and confront and negotiate with "the enemy." This process empowers children of all ages, opening us to the gift of dreams.

About the Author

The author of 13 books, art and dream therapist Ann Sayre Wiseman was also an accomplished artist in many mediums. Her work appears in the Smithsonian, among other collections. Wiseman received her master's degree from Lesley College in Cambridge, MA, where she taught graduate students for many years. She died in 2013.