We don’t really understand why we dream. It’s something scientists have been baffled by for decades. However, researchers may have found a simple way to stop nightmares. A 2022 study, which focused on 36 patients diagnosed with a nightmare disorder, shows that we can use two simple therapies to change how our minds deal with bad dreams.
The trick, the study shows, is to rewrite those nightmares and then play a sound that our brains can associate with a positive experience. The entire idea was that by playing a single chord on the piano, we might be able to change how someone’s dreams are playing out.
See, nightmares are a pretty common occurrence, and I don’t just mean the standard cases of a few bad dreams here and there. No, some people actually have consistent nightmares, which leads to poor sleep quality, which can then be tied to an assortment of other health-related issues. So, how do we stop nightmares without being invasive to the people suffering from them?
That’s the question that researchers set out to answer in a study they published in Current Biology in 2022. In their findings, the researchers discuss how they used imagery rehearsal therapy to have patients rewrite their most frequent and worst nightmares to give them a happier ending. Then, the patients would “rehearse” this nightmare by telling themselves the rewritten version over and over.
The idea here was that you could stop frequent nightmares by overwriting them with other stories. It’s a treatment shown to reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares in some patients. However, it isn’t effective for everyone. That’s where we find the second part of the treatment therapies the researchers used: targeted memory reactivation or TMR.
TMR essentially uses sounds to train certain stimuli to become activated while people are sleeping, and the researchers hoped that by combining TMR with imagery rehearsal therapy, they could ensure patients suffering from nightmares actually remembered the rewritten version of their nightmares.
And, so far, it seems to work pretty well at stopping nightmares. Based on the findings detailed in the study, the TMR group started with around 2.94 weekly nightmares. However, by the end, the TMR group’s weekly nightmares had dropped to just 0.19. The control group, on the other hand, started with 2.58 nightmares a week and ended with 1.02 weekly nightmares.
Additionally, the researchers say the TMR group reported an increase in happier dreams overall, which was a nice improvement for many. And it doesn’t seem like this treatment wears off too quickly, either. During a three-month follow-up, they discovered that the control group’s weekly nightmares had only risen to 1.48 a week, and the TMR group reported an increase to 0.33.
So, while it didn’t stop nightmares completely, it did reduce them by quite a lot, and that reduction has mostly stuck with many of those patients. Now, whether or not this has continued to be the case two years later remains to be seen. But it is nice to know that scientists have made significant breakthroughs like this, especially considering how hard scientists have been working to control your dreams.
