How do you comfort a child who has a bad dream?

I definately dont think ignoring the child is a good idea and I could never do that myself..Both of my kids are prone to nightmares due to life circumstances unfortunately and when they do have one they know to come and wake me up if I've not gone to them first....Usually what i do is hug them and tell them its ok it was just a bad dream then I have them tell me about it (sometimes they dont want to though and thats fine too) then I usually tell them somethign like "but you knwo that cant happen right" or whatever fits for the basis of the dream....they get lots of hugs and kisses and the option of getting into bed with me (if it was a really bad one)...

A dream is the experience of envisioned images, sounds, or other sensations during sleep. The events of dreams are often impossible or unlikely to occur in physical reality, and are usually outside the control of the dreamer. The exception is lucid dreaming, in which a dreamer realizes that he is dreaming, and is sometimes even capable of changing the oneiric reality around him or her and controlling various aspects of the dream, in which the suspension of disbelief is broken.[1] Dreamers may experience strong emotions while dreaming. Frightening or upsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares. The discipline of dream research is oneirology. Psychologist Joe Griffin, one of the founders of human givens psychology, has proposed the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming. On the basis of a twelve-year study, Griffin claims that dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors.[2][3] In a New Scientist interview, Griffin stated that "...ordinarily dream sleep does a great housekeeping job for us[,] bring[ing] down our autonomic arousal level." Griffin's expectation fulfilment theory of dreams states that dreams are metaphorical translations of waking expectations. Expectations which cause emotional arousal that is not acted upon during the day to quell the arousal, become dreams during sleep. Finally, he holds that dreaming deactivates that emotional arousal by completing the expectation pattern metaphorically, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day.[4]Michel Jouvet's research has suggested that instinctive behaviours are programmed during the REM state in the fetus and the neonate. This is actually necessarily in the form of incomplete templates for which the dreamer later identifies analogous sensory components in reality. These analogical templates give dreamers the ability to respond to the environment in a flexible way and generate the ability to learn, rather than simply react.