Our 4.5 year old daughter is killing us because she won’t sleep

My wife and I are at our absolute wit’s end and are losing sanity, health, and functionality because our daughter is THE. WORST. SLEEPER. ON. THE. PLANET. She has always been clingy - wanting to feed constantly at night as a baby/toddler and waking almost every half hour and needing to be settled. We ended up sleeping the whole family on two mattresses on the floor - I was with first born (son) and my wife was with little miss energy vampire. It got to the point my wife was basically screaming her lungs out inside her head and fighting the need to tear her skin off or jump in the car and drive away forever due to the effect this was having on her.Eventually we got bunk beds for the kids and we returned to our queen bed but still all in the same room. Miss 5 complained and begged for 6 months for the beds to be returned to “normal” and essentially approached every bed time by working herself up into such a state she was crying and crying. Her reason for being upset was that she didn’t want “bad dreams”. We’ve tried everything we can think of to help her change her attitude towards sleep - with visualisation, nightly talks about how the crying was making bad chemicals in her brain causing even more bad dreams, making stories about her and the monsters plaguing her and how she overcomes them with funny or silly things happening as a result (think Harry Potter’s boggarts).Nothing has helped and eventually I had to move out of the room. My wife tried coming with me - i.e. relinquishing the main bedroom to the kids, their bunk and their toys, but not long after my wife gave up and moved back in on a single mattress on their floor. Even with her head being basically next to my daughter’s head but her body being perpendicular away from her, this isn’t good enough. I can hear her now as I type this - it’s been 20 minutes of quiet and now she’s crying about bad dreams again.She is killing us.My wife is a zombie, I believe it’s dangerous for her to be driving the kids around, and she’s just a shell of a person. We’re barely functioning and we just can’t stand being anywhere near our daughter anymore. When she’s carrying on I just want to build a sound proof padded room and throw her in there all night and let her cry and cry and cry for all I care (but obviously this is just my frustration talking).There is honestly no lack of love and comfort in this family. She has no reason to be this anxious / scared of sleep and we have done everything we can to make her feel safe and secure and loved.Fuck this whole situation. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2STZYwd