Scientists have discovered a way to stop nightmares
And it was all done with a sound!
Since we still don’t know why and how the human brain creates dreams while we sleep, dealing with chronic nightmares is a really big challenge. However, now, a new very interesting scientific research has shown that the combination of two simple treatments can reduce their incidence!
Specifically, scientists recruited 36 volunteers diagnosed with ‘nightmare disorder’, asking them to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive way, then having them listen to a sound associated with positive experiences as they slept.
One of the authors of the scientific study is the Greek Lambros Perogambros, senior researcher of Psychiatry at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who, speaking about it, emphasized:
There is a link between the emotions we experience in our dreams and our overall emotional well-being.
Based on this observation, we had the idea that we could help people by manipulating the emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of very negative and emotionally powerful dreams in patients suffering from nightmares.
The idea behind the research:
In 2010 scientists found that playing sounds that people have associated with a particular stimulus while someone sleeps can help strengthen the memory of that stimulus. This was called targeted memory reactivation (TMR). Perogambros and his colleagues therefore wanted to determine if this technique could improve the effectiveness of ‘imagery rehearsal’ therapy (IRT).
The experiment:
The scientific team, therefore, first had the 36 volunteers fill a diary for two weeks, recording statistics about their sleep and the dreams they saw. Then, everyone received an IRT session, with the scientists then dividing the participants into two groups.
Half also underwent a TMR session, to create a link between a positive version of their nightmares and a sound. The other half were the control group, so they were asked to imagine a less horrific version of their nightmare, but without being exposed to positive sounds.
Both groups were given a pair of sleep headphones that played a sound every 10 seconds – the C69 note of a piano – more specifically during REM sleep, when nightmares were most likely to occur.
Results:
The first evaluation of the results was done after two weeks, with the groups filling out another diary, while the scientists spoke with them again three months later, without any other type of treatment.
At the start of the study, the control group had an average of 2.58 nightmares per week, while the TMR group had an average of 2.94 nightmares per week. By the end of the study, the control group saw a significant decrease to 1.02 nightmares per week, while the TMR group saw a dramatic drop to just 0.19 nightmares per week . Even more promising, the TMR team also reported an increase in happy dreams.
After the three-month period, nightmares had increased slightly in both groups, to 1.48 and 0.33 per week respectively. However, the number is still remarkably small, suggesting that the use of targeted memory reactivation to support IRT therapy may indeed lead to very promising results.
After all, repeating a sound that has been associated with the positive version of a nightmare seems to go a long way toward eliminating it!
The scientific research was published in Current Biology on October 27, with the official title ‘Enhancing imagery rehearsal therapy for nightmares with targeted memory reactivation’.
You can find it by clicking here.
