When you’re trapped in a nightmare, especially one that returns to haunt you night after night, sleeping could be as far from resting as you can imagine.
According to various studies, 4% of adults suffer from nightmare disorder, also known as dream anxiety disorder.
The majority of individuals occasionally dream of falling, being naked in public, being followed, looking for a bathroom, or losing teeth, but this is much worse.
The nights of those who experience nightmare disorder are ruined by vivid, horrible dreams that fill them with so much terror and anxiety that they are unable to sleep or rest.
Scientists have recently discovered a treatment that may finally put an end to recurrent nightmares. Normally, this condition is treated with stress reduction techniques like practicing yoga or meditation, and in the most severe cases, with psychotherapy and even medication (when someone is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, for example).
Neuroscientists asked 36 patients with recurrent nightmares to practice image rehearsal therapy, or IRT, a cognitive-behavioral treatment technique that has people recollect their dreams while changing the negative storyline to a positive one. The study was published on October 27 in Current Biology.
After two or three weeks of repetition, rehearsing this positive dream scenario throughout the day has been shown to lessen nightmares, however this method has only been effective in 30% of patients.
For this reason, the study’s neuroscientists propose a new therapy called targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. During this process, a person concentrates on learning something (an idea or behavior) while listening to a particular sound, which is subsequently played again as a trigger while they are sleeping.
The 36 study participants were divided into two groups: half were instructed to review their dreams in quiet, while the other half were instructed to do so while listening to a brief piano chord played every 10 seconds for five minutes.
Then, during the REM stage of their sleep, which is also the time when people are thought to experience their most vivid nightmares, the same patients heard the identical piano chord again.
The results were interesting: although there was a decrease in nightmares for both patient groups, for those who had tested a combination of IRT and TMR, the nightmares had almost entirely disappeared, with a weekly average of 0.2 down from 3.
The number of nightmares decreased to 1.5 per week for the second group, which had been trained in reviewing their dreams in silence.
“By deploying and popularizing easy-to-use devices at home to produce permanent consolidation of safety memories, these therapies can easily reach a big part of clinical populations and lead to new innovative approaches for promoting emotional well-being,” the study’s authors wrote.
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