By using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it will be possible to reduce the screaming fears that plague our sleep. A study of 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder last year found that a combination of two simple treatments reduced the frequency of bad dreams.

The scientists asked volunteers to positively rewrite their most frequent nightmares and then play a sound during sleep associated with positive impressions.

“There is a correlation between the types of emotions we feel in our sleep and our emotional health,” psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the University Hospitals of Geneva and the University of Geneva in Switzerland said in 2022.

“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 emotionally intense and highly negative dreams in patients with nightmares.”

Many people suffer from nightmares that are not always just a few bad dreams. Nightmares are also linked to poor sleep quality, which has been linked to a host of other health problems.

Insufficient sleep can also increase anxiety, which can lead to insomnia and nightmares. Recent research has shown that nightmares and sleep disturbances are on the rise during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.

Treating chronic nightmares is quite a challenge, given that we don’t really understand why or even how our brains create dreams while we sleep.

One non-invasive method is imagery rehearsal therapy, in which patients rewrite their most painful and common nightmares to ensure a happy ending. They then “rehearse” to tell themselves this rewritten story in order to rewrite the nightmare.

This method can reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares, but the treatment is not effective for all patients.

In 2010, scientists found that playing sounds that people learn to associate with a particular stimulus while they sleep helps improve memory for that stimulus. This has been called targeted memory reactivation (TMR), and Perogamvros and colleagues wanted to see if it could improve the effectiveness of imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT).

After study participants completed a dream and sleep diary for two weeks, all volunteers received one session of IRT. At this point, half of the group entered a TMR session that linked the sound of their nightmares with the positive.

The other half served as a control group, imagining a less frightening version of the nightmare without being exposed to positive noises.

Both groups were given a sleep headband, which plays a sound—a C69 piano chord—while sleeping every 10 seconds during REM sleep, where nightmares are highly likely.

The groups were reassessed after two weeks of additional diary entries and then three months after no treatment.

At the start of the study, the control group averaged 2.58 nightmares per week, while the TMR group averaged 2.94 nightmares per week. At the end of the study, the control group’s number of nightmares per week had dropped to 1.02, while the TMR group had dropped to just 0.19. More encouragingly, the TMR group reported an increase in happy dreams.

After three months of follow-up, the number of nightmares increased slightly in both groups to 1.48 and 0.33 per week, respectively. However, the researchers say this is still an impressive reduction in nightmares, suggesting that using TMR to supplement IRT leads to more effective treatment.

“We were pleasantly surprised at how well the participants respected and tolerated study procedures, such as rehearsing image therapy every day and wearing a sleep bandage overnight,” Perogamvros said. Said.

“We observed a rapid decrease in the number of nightmares and dreams became more emotionally positive. For us researchers and clinicians, these findings are very promising both for the study of emotional processing during sleep and for the development of new treatments.” The team’s research has been published in Current Biology.