Baby and Nightmares.

Bad dreams can start at a very early age (even younger than your child). One of my sons is known to have night terrors from time to time. He will start crying and at times act like he is awake, when he really is not. He will not answer me when I ask a question and after a few minutes will stop.

There really isn't much you can do but sit with your child and try to calm them down. I was told not to try and wake my son up while he is having this happen...instead I am to sit there and rub his back or gentle talk to him until he stops.

my son who is now just about to turn 2 experienced bad dreams a lot as a baby and still occasionally does. He would start crying and so we would go in and see what was wrong or try and console him but most of the time we couldn't get him to wake up. We would try turning on the lights, taking his clothes off, changing his diaper, talking really loud but nothing would ever wake him up. often we would just have to put him back in his crib to let him cry for a little while and he would then stop crying and sleep soundly the rest of the night. When he was a baby this would happen often it seemed and a friend of mine told me her son had that problem too when he was a baby and she said they figured out that it was from him getting too warm at night which would some how cause bad dreams. She said once she started dressing him a little cooler for bedtime the dreams stopped or at least he wasn't waking up crying anymore. Just a thought, maybe something to try.

I don't think so...but could it have been a night terror?

My son did, around that age. Eventually I figured out that he only did it after being in the room when my husband was watching one of his movies (usually a drama with intense/scary scenes or music, like war movies and such). At first, I didn't think it would bother my son, because I thought he couldn't possibly understand that a man walking through a park could be scary; but when I finally realized that there was a pattern to him crying out while asleep, I made sure he wasn't in the room during such movies, or that my husband paused/stopped them when he was in there. And it stopped.

Oh, and he's 6 y/o now, and the only time he has scary dreams is after watching scary movies -- and by "scary", that includes movies like "Monsters, Inc." which are mostly funny but have some scary roars and stuff. He just seems to pick up on and deeply remember "scary" things like this.