One method used to stop nightmares encourages people to rehearse a positive version of the unpleasant dream in their head over and over. This treatment, called video rehearsal therapy, is used to stop nightmares and correct the associated problems with sudden awakenings and poor quality sleep.
Video rehearsal therapy has been found to be quite effective for stopping nightmares in some people. However, there are some cases that do not respond to this approach.
So, can the stimuli associated with a positive daytime experience help them find peace while calming down? A new study examined the effect of sound played through a wireless headband worn during sleep on nightmare frequency. Researchers enrolled 36 image rehearsal therapy patients and tasked half of them with rewriting their nightmares from a positive perspective during an audio imagination exercise.
In daily practice, image rehearsal therapy with added sound stimuli was performed. Next, 36 participants slept with headbands that could transmit sound, and their sleep was recorded for 2 weeks. Nightmares typically occur during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. That’s why it’s the sleep cycle state that researchers are most interested in.
Fortunately for the dreamers, both groups saw an improvement in their sleep, as the number of nightmares per week everyone studied decreased. However, the group that received the combination of vision and sound therapy saw a reduction in nightmare frequency that lasted more than three months. They even began to have more joyful dreams instead of nightmares.
“There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional health,” says senior author Lampros Perogamvros, a psychiatrist at the University of Geneva Hospitals and the University of Geneva Sleep Lab. “From this observation we can help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. we came to the idea. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally strong and very negative dreams in patients with nightmares.”
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