Cassidy Morrison Dailymail.Com Senior Health Reporter
Updated May 22, 2024 23:50, May 22, 2024 23:52
Sleep scientists have discovered the key to unlocking good dreams and banishing bad ones.
Renowned sleep researcher Dr. Matt Walker shares his cutting-edge tips for happier dreams. The idea is to rewrite the terrifying ending of a nightmare to something neutral or positive, replaying the new version in your mind while you’re awake, and practicing it until it becomes ingrained in your sleep.
About 85 percent of the population experiences nightmares at least once a year, but an unlucky subset, about 4 percent, have nightmares weekly or nightly.
Many people are able to shake off the negative effects that remain after waking up from an unpleasant dream and go about their day normally, but it can be difficult to shake off the feeling, especially when nightmares start to occur weekly or nightly. Many people feel that way.
The training is particularly useful for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 96% of whom may suffer from frightening dreams in which they re-experience aspects of the traumatic event.
People who practiced this method, known as image rehearsal therapy, were able to reverse the nightmare scenario and make it less scary, if not completely eliminate the nightmare, within just a few weeks.
First developed in 1978, this technique involves patients writing down their most frequent distressing nightmares in as much detail as possible and discussing them with a therapist, who can then discuss the person’s most frequent and distressing nightmares that may be triggering various disturbing aspects of the dream. Explore possible stressors in your life.
And then, perhaps literally, the patient erases the nightmare’s troubling climax and writes a new, more appealing ending to the dream. It doesn’t have to be logical, as long as it doesn’t provoke fear.
Walker, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, cited dreams of a catastrophic car accident as a prime example.
In the dream, he was driving towards a busy intersection and the light turned red. However, instead of the car slowing down gradually, the brakes do not respond to his foot presses.
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Eventually, he goes through an intersection and hits another car, the impact waking him up and leaving a lasting impression on him for the rest of the day.
In image rehearsal therapy sessions, he rewrote the nightmare and gave it a new ending. Maybe the brakes don’t respond to the pressure of his foot.
But instead, he could mentally practice reaching down and pulling the handbrake to bring the car to a slow stop before reaching a dangerous intersection.
Patients go through this with a therapist but must practice at home. Patients visualize dreams with new positive endings for about 20 minutes each day for a week.
The brain then absorbs this updated version through a process known as memory consolidation, which Dr. Walker has studied for decades.
He said, ‘If you continue doing that and you get an alternate ending, essentially what you’re doing is reactivating the memory of a traumatic car accident and then rehearsing this alternate ending.’ I went into the Word document and edited out the sections that were really horrific and egregious and replaced them with neutral or even positive content.”
Memory consolidation is when the brain converts short-term memories into long-term memories during REM sleep.
REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, is one of the four sleep stages in which dreaming occurs, and IRT exploits this memory consolidation process to replace old, distressing dreams with new ones.
Dr. Walker added, “You come back the next day and make more edits and updates. Over and over again, gradually the stories and nightmares that are fixed in your brain disappear.” The frequency decreases proportionally.
This method of overcoming bad dreams has proven effective after just one session with a therapist.
A 2021 study found that after practicing a new version of a nightmare, 64 percent of people who experienced nightmares had fewer nightmares overall over the eight-week study period, and 63 percent of them found their dreams less painful. I understand that you have reported that this has happened.
Follow-up studies further increased the efficacy rate. Scientists in Switzerland conducted the same experiment, but when some of the patients told them new endings to their dreams, the therapist played soothing piano chords. He repeated this several times.
Then, when the patient went to sleep at night, the doctors fitted them with headphones that played soft piano chords as they entered REM sleep.
Adding this simple, soothing piano chord increased the IRT effect from a 64 percent reduction in nightmare frequency to about 92 percent.
In just two weeks, people who listened to the sounds and mentally rehearsed new dreams during their waking hours had fewer nightmares per week and were more likely to have pleasant dreams.