Researchers have found an incredible way to stop nightmares

We don’t really understand why do we dream. This is something that scientists have been puzzled about for decades. However, researchers may have found a simple way to stop nightmares. A 2022 study of 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder suggests that we can use two simple treatments to change the way our minds deal with bad dreams.

Trick, research showsis to rewrite those nightmares and then play a sound that our brain can associate with a positive experience. The whole idea was that by playing one chord on the piano, we could change the way someone’s dreams come true.

You see, nightmares are quite common, and I don’t mean the standard case of a few bad dreams here and there. No, some people actually have recurring nightmares, which leads to poor sleep quality, which can then be linked to a number of other health-related problems. So how do we stop nightmares without harming the people suffering from them?

That’s the question researchers set out to answer in a study published in the journal Current biology in 2022. In their findings, the researchers discuss how they used imagery rehearsal therapy to get patients to rewrite their most frequent and worst nightmares to give them a happier ending. Patients then “rehearsed” the nightmare, repeating the rewritten version to themselves over and over again.

The idea was that you could stop frequent nightmares by overwriting them with other stories. This treatment has been shown to reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares in some patients. However, it is not effective for everyone. This is where we find the second half of the treatments the researchers used: targeted memory reactivation, or TMR.

Essentially, TMR uses sounds to train the activation of certain stimuli during sleep, and the researchers hoped that by combining TMR with imagery rehearsal therapy, they could ensure that patients suffering from nightmares would actually remember a rewritten version of their nightmares.

And so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job of stopping the nightmares. The TMR group started out with 2.94 nightmares per week, according to the study. However, by the end of the week, the TMR group’s weekly nightmares had dropped to just 0.19. On the other hand, the control group started with 2.58 nightmares per week and ended with 1.02 nightmares per week.

Additionally, the researchers say the TMR group reported an increase in happier dreams overall, which was a good improvement for many. And this treatment doesn’t seem to go away too quickly. During the three-month follow-up, they found that weekly nightmares in the control group increased to just 1.48 per week, while the TMR group reported an increase of up to 0.33.

Thus, although the nightmares did not stop completely, they did decrease significantly, and this decrease was largely sustained in many of these patients. It remains to be seen whether this situation remains the same two years later. But it’s nice to know that scientists have made such significant breakthroughs, especially considering how hard scientists have worked on control your dreams.