I am a leading sleep specialist. Here’s how you can banish nightmares FOREVER by ‘hacking’ them
Sleep scientists have found the key to unlocking good dreams and banishing bad dreams.
Prominent sleep researcher Dr. Matt Walker discussed the advanced hack to happier dreams, in which patients rewrite the terrifying ending of their nightmare to become neutral or even positive and practice playing out that new version in their heads while awake until it holds up in their sleep.
About 85 percent of the population experiences a nightmare at least once a year, but an unfortunate subset of about four percent experience nightmares weekly or even every night.
While many are able to shake off the lingering negative effects of waking from a disturbing dream and continue with their day normally, many others may find it difficult to shake those feelings, especially when the bad dreams become a weekly occurrence. or nocturnal event.
The practice is especially helpful for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 96 percent of whom are likely to be affected by terrible dreams in which they relive aspects of their traumatic event.
People who practiced this method, known as imagery rehearsal therapy, were able to flip the script on their nightmares to make them less scary, or even eliminate them completely in just a few weeks.
Prominent sleep scientist Dr. Matt Walker told Dr. Andrew Huberman on his podcast that imagery exercise therapy is a highly effective way to hack nightmares and give them new, pleasant endings. Photo courtesy of the Huberman Lab podcast
This modality, first developed in 1978, involves a patient writing down their most common, disturbing nightmare in great detail and discussing it with a therapist, and exploring the possible stressors in that person’s life that could be affecting various disturbing aspects of the dream could drive.
Then the patient, perhaps literally, erases the disturbing climax of the nightmare and writes a new, more attractive ending to the dream. It doesn’t have to be logical, as long as it doesn’t cause fear.
Dr. Walker, who researches sleep at the University of California, Berkeley, used a dream about a devastating car accident as a prime example.
In the dream he drives towards a busy intersection and the light turns red. But instead of slowing the car down gradually, the brakes don’t respond to his foot pumping.
It isn’t long before he crosses the intersection and is hit by another car. The impact wakes him up, but stays with him for the rest of the day.
During a session of imagery exercise therapy, he rewrote the nightmare and gave it a new ending. Maybe the brakes aren’t responding to the pressure under his foot.
But instead, he was able to rehearse in his mind as he reached over to apply the handbrake and slowly bring the car to a stop before reaching the deadly intersection.
A patient will work through this with a therapist, but it takes practice at home. For about 20 minutes a day for a week, the patient will visualize the dream with its new positive ending.
The brain records this updated version through a process known as memory consolidation, which Dr. Walker has been studying for decades.
He said, “If you keep doing that, once you have that alternate ending, essentially every time you reactivate the memory of the trauma car crash, and then rehearse this alternate ending, it’s like I went to the Word document and edited the part that was really gruesome and bad and replaced it with something that was neutral or even positive.”
Memory consolidation is the brain’s way of converting short-term memory into long-term memory during REM sleep.
REM, or rapid eye movement, is one of the four stages of sleep in which dreams occur. IRT uses this memory consolidation process to replace the old, disturbing dream with a new one.
Dr. Walker added, “I’ll come back the next day, and I’ll do some more edits and updates, and over and over again, over and over again, you gradually expel the story recorded in the brain, and the nightmare frequency increases proportionally finished.’
This method of defeating bad dreams turned out to be effective after a single session with a therapist.
A 2021 study found that after practicing a new version of their nightmare, 64 percent of people who experienced nightmares had fewer nightmares overall over an eight-week study period, and 63 percent of them reported that their dreams decreased were disturbing.
A follow-up study further increased these efficacy rates. Scientists in Switzerland conducted the same experiment, but when some patients described the new endings to their dreams, therapists said played a pleasant piano chord. This was repeated several times.
Then, when those patients went to sleep at night, doctors placed headphones on them that caused the soft piano chord to play as they entered REM.
Adding that simple, pleasant piano chord increased the effectiveness of IRT from 64 percent to a reduction in nightmare frequency to about 92 percent.
After just two weeks, the people who were awake listening to the sound while rehearsing their new dreams in their heads had fewer nightmares per week and were more likely to have joyful dreams.