Ha! DD3 has an incredible upchuck talent with heavy sobbing and has since infancy. She still does it sometimes. We never tried cry it out with that one!

Sorry to say, kimck, I don't think upchuck-ability goes away. At least, it doesn't by age 10.

acs - I've always had a lot of nightmares too, though they are more rare now. For me, and DD, we remind ourselves in the dream that it is a dream. Then, we're free to modify what happens. I'm not sure what it is that allows one to step outside the dream enough to recognize that it is a dream, I started doing that spontaneously and somehow DD was able to do it after I described it to her. Sort of like a watch set in my head and sometimes it gets triggered. Sometimes I have wished it did NOT interrupt, as I wanted to see where the dream was going and was unable to settle back in. This is a lame explanation, I fear.

An example is a dream of driving fast and out of control down a crazy winding road with cliffs on the side, then clearly losing it and knowing that am going over the side. Interrupt triggered, scene grey out, voice-over reminder that this is only a dream, return to dream of car plunging through the air. Then the car bounces on its tires over and over. Seems silly instead of scary, dream continues to somewhere else.

I think someone else here mentioned something similar one time. Maybe they will chime in with their experience.

Lorel and Incog,
Ferber didn't sit well with us either. We tried CIO once with DD2, and he cried for well over an hour. He would stand up in bed and shake the crib rails. He hated his crib. When we dismantled his crib and put the mattress on the floor (at about 1 year of age) he slept much better.

He still doesn't sleep great, and we don't know why. He slept from 10:00 until 5:30 last night, and that's pretty typical for him. Yikes!

acs and kcab - I don't have alot of nightmares but I do have very bad dreams on occasion. I also modify my dreams when they get too distressing. If I can't modify it enough I usually wake up and then modify it to make it not so scary or upsetting, etc.

My DS10 didn't sleep all the way through the night until he was about 3 but my DS6 slept through the night at 7 weeks! Whenever he has a bad dream now he comes in my room and sleeps in a sleeping bag we keep on the floor. When he was younger he used to come in my room almost every night but now it only happens occasionally. Thank goodness! I'm with Kriston on needing my sleep.

DS11 also talks about being able to modify his dreams, but I get the idea that they are extr-intense. Recently he said that he actually died in a dream, and why do people say that you can't. I had no idea!
Grinity

oh...sleep...

The first 4 years were very rough. As a new born the ONLY way my son would sleep was laying on his stomach. From the first hour, he screamed himself sick if put on his back. On his side occasionally worked but only for cat naps of 15-20 minutes. As a result he slep with DH and I for the first 6 months all the time. His favorite position where he would sleep for about 2 hours was on his stomach on top of either DH's or my chest. I think our heartbeats soothed him.
Needless to say, this appalled most everyone that knew about it especially the Drs who kept talking about smothering and how many children die in a family bed. Well meaning family and friends convinced us to give the CIO approach a try when he was about 6 months old. Since he could easily turn himself over, crawl and sit -up by then, we thought maybe it would work. Like some other posters, what happened was that he would cry to the point of throwing up and having an asthma attack. That didn't last more than a couple tries.
At 12 months he would climb out of the crib... I refused to make the crib a cage so we put the mattress on the floor and tried that. Well, he wasn't willing to STAY on the mattress and kept running out of his room to see what we were doing for hours after bedtime. I figured he was getting too much sleep with the madatory naps at daycare (later found out, he didn't nap there either). I ended up being one of those Mom's carting the toddler to the grocery store or Walmart at 11:oo at night hoping to get him sleepy in the car. The bright lights at the stores seemed to help also.
For the next 2-3 years, either DH or I would go up and read to him then lay with him until he fell asleep. Most nights we ended up sleeping on his floor because we would fall asleep before him.

Around 6 he decided he could go to bed in his room by himself at a reasonable time. Even now at almost 9, we have to get him going to bed with lots of protests though. He often wakes in the night. Doesn't seem to be nightmares, just wakes up and then stays awake for a couple hours thinking. Sometimes he comes and gets us, but most of the time, I only know he woke up because the bathroom light is on.

Ahh yes, letting him go to bed with a book doesn't work well if we want him to sleep. I remember a couple months ago, I let him go to bed with a book. Then I dosed off myself and forgot to go tell him to turn out his light. Around 2:00 AM he came in and asked if it was ok to start a new book... He had finished the book (easily 400+ pages) and was ready to read more. At least it wasn't a school night :P

I've wondered about that one too (death in dreams). I've had it happen a few times. One of those was by drowning and it felt as puzzling as it was scary - I'm an excellent swimmer and was at that time too. I wonder if that is why it didn't set off any alarms during the dream.

pink - we followed almost exactly the same path as you with our DD (took apart crib at 13 mo, switched to futon on floor). For whatever reason, she never would get off the futon until we came and got her, so at least there wasn't much of a safety issue. A big change in her sleep happened later, around 4 or 5 yo, that's when she stopped getting up early and we started having to wake her up for school.

I feel pretty lucky, reading everyone's sleep experiences. I know ours felt excruciating when DD was an infant and toddler and I'm glad we don't have those problems now.

This is called "lucid dreaming" and I have been able to do it almost as far back as I can remember. Here is how Wikipedia describes this experience:
"A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment, as well as to perform otherwise physically impossible feats. Lucid dreams are known to be extremely real and vivid for those who have experienced them."

And here is what they say about them as a treatment for nightmares:
"People who suffer from nightmares would benefit from the ability to be aware they are dreaming. A pilot study was performed in 2006 that showed lucid dreaming treatment was successful in reducing nightmare frequency. This treatment consisted of exposure to the idea, mastery of the technique, and lucidity exercises. It was not clear what aspects of the treatment were responsible for the success of overcoming nightmares, though the treatment as a whole was successful."


Unfortunately, it used to control my nightmares, but does not anymore. The bad dreams are much less frequent, but, although I am aware they are dreams, I do not have the control I used to have. Sometimes I decide to wake up because I do not like how the dream is going or it is not responding as I want it to. Then I get up and walk into the kitchen to get a snack, open a drawer and it is filled with snakes. Oh, shoot, I'm still asleep. So I decide to wake up again. I wake, go find my husband who is working late in the living room. We chat for a bit and then he turns into a vampire. Oops, still asleep! So I wake up again, walk down the hall to the bathroom and the floor drops out. sometimes this will happen 8 or more times. It is terrifying.

But looking up some things for this post has actually been really helpful. I just found out about "sleep paralysis", which is clearly one of the problems I am having as I try to get out of these endless dreams. when I do almost wake up, I realize I am unable to move and feel like I'm choking to death. I didn't know this was common, but I found a lot of info on it. Here is an interesting link (it's not the most scientific, perhaps, but it is the most artistic.)
http://www.castleofspirits.com/sleepparalysis.html

Whew, I was worried I killed this thread.

acs - you've probably already found this article: Night of the Crusher, Science News. (And I hope that isn't behind the paywall.) I found it compelling when I read it a couple of years ago, was reminded of it reading your post. Not sure if it has any useful leads for you but thought I'd put it out there.

I'll have to go read about lucid dreaming. Earlier, I was thinking it was odd that I could still remember some of my dreams from long ago.

At 3 months my son started sleeping through the night. He's 2 now and it's hit or miss. Last night he was wide awake at 2am. I could hear him coyly call out "Mooom..." which soon escalated to "MOM!". When I went in his room he told me he wanted to play with the computer. I told him no. Putting a dimmer switch in his room has helped a lot. I was able to get him to stop whining after I dimmed the lights and let him "read" a book.