By Michelle Starr, Science Alert | Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it might be possible to curtail the screaming horrors that plague our sleep. A study conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with a nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the frequency of their bad dreams. Scientists invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive light and then played sound associated with positive experiences as they slept.
“There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional well-being,” psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva in Switzerland explained in 2022 when the results were published.
“Based on this observation, we had the idea that we could help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally very strong and very negative dreams in patients suffering from nightmares.”
Many people suffer from nightmares, which aren’t always a simple case of a few bad dreams. Nightmares are also associated with poor-quality sleep, which in turn is linked with a whole plethora of other health issues.
Poor sleep can also increase anxiety, which in turn can result in insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies have shown that nightmares and sleep disturbances have seen an uptick during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Given that we don’t really understand why, or even how, our brain creates dreams while we sleep, treating chronic nightmares is something of a challenge.
One non-invasive method is imagery rehearsal therapy, in which patients rewrite their most harrowing and frequent nightmares to give them a happy ending. Then, they “rehearse” telling themselves that rewritten story, trying to overwrite the nightmare.
This method can reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares, but the treatment is not effective for all patients.
In 2010 scientists found that playing sounds that people have been trained to associate with a certain stimulus, while those people are sleeping, aids in boosting the memory of that stimulus. This has been named targeted memory reactivation (TMR), and Perogamvros and colleagues wanted to find out if it could improve the effectiveness of imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT).
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Go here to read more on this study:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/nightmares-can-be-silenced-by-a-single-piano-chord-study-shows/
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01477-4
The team’s research was published in Current Biology.
An earlier version of this article was published in October 2022.
Photo: Nightmare monster | https://www.facebook.com/NightmareNostalgia/photos