Anyone who has experienced trauma will also experience intense dreams or nightmares. Nightmares are a very common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They are a way that the subconscious mind tries to make sense out of trauma.

I strongly encourage anyone who has endured trauma to keep a dream journal. If your foster or adopted child is too young to keep one for himself, I strongly encourage you, as the adoptive parent, to keep one for him. Write down every detail that the child shares, including colors and locations. Look for repeated patterns because they will help you understand what the child is currently dealing with.

For example, I was plagued with nightmares throughout my adult life, even though I had no memory of the abuse until I was in my mid-thirties. I kept a dream journal to try to understand these dreams, and I noticed many patterns. For example, all of them had some symbol related to childhood, such as taking place in a Children’s museum. They had a repeated pattern of threes (three people, three similar items, etc.), which I realized was that the abuse hurt my body, soul, and spirit. I frequently dreamt about trains, which represented me feeling like I had no control over the direction of my life. (A train can only go where the track goes, and the train does not build the track.)

If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who has been traumatized, your child probably suffers from vivid nightmares. The child might awaken in a cold sweat with his or her heart racing. The child might even shake after having one.

These nightmares are the traumatized child’s way of trying to make sense of senseless trauma. In some cases, the nightmares are actually flashbacks of real events that occurred in the child’s life. In other cases, the nightmares are not true factually, but they are “true” in emotion.

For example, I had a vivid nightmare recently that was not factual but was very much true in emotion. I was my adult self, standing in my bedroom and watching a video of my child self. I looked like a really cute preteen boy. (My parents would not let me dress or wear my hair like a girl, so everyone always thought I was a boy until after puberty.)

While I was watching the video, a huge spider’s web fell on top of me, and I got tangled up in it.

One of the most distressing types of nightmares that the adopted abused child might experience is dreams of abusing others. Your adopted child might be afraid to talk to you about these dreams because then you might think that he is going to become a child abuser himself. As long as your abused adopted child is distressed by these dreams, you need not fear that this is an indication of a propensity to abuse. It is actually just the opposite.

The subconscious uses dreams to work through things that are bothering the abused adopted child. A dream about abusing another child is really the child's way of trying to make sense of what he has experienced.

I was horrified the first time I had one of these dreams.