Nightmares, those fearful memories that re-emerge in dreams, can sometimes become regular occurrences, visiting people multiple times a week for month

Scientists attempt to ease nightmares by manipulating emotions in dreams

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2024-10-29 02:00:06

Nightmares, those fearful memories that re-emerge in dreams, can sometimes become regular occurrences, visiting people multiple times a week for months on end. In therapy, dreamers may be coached to rehearse positive versions of their most frequent nightmares, but in a study of such patients publishing October 27 in the journal Current Biology, researchers in Switzerland take this a step further. They found that also playing a sound—one associated with a positive daytime experience—through a wireless headband during sleep may reduce nightmare frequency.

“There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional well-being,” says senior author Lampros Perogamvros, a psychiatrist at the Sleep Laboratory of the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva. “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.”

Epidemiological studies have found that up to 4 percent of adults have chronic nightmares at any given moment, a condition often associated with waking up during the night and lower-quality sleep. Patients are commonly prescribed imagery rehearsal therapy, which asks them to change the negative storyline toward a more positive ending and rehearse the rewritten dream scenario during the day. While effective, some cases are unresponsive.

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