New study suggests nightmares can be stopped with sound therapy

By Mark Waghorn via SWNS

Nightmares can be stopped - using sound therapy, according to new research.

Terrifying scenarios range from being chased to meeting monsters and demons or seeing something tragic happen to a loved one.

Poor sleep has been linked to a host of serious illnesses - including dementia, heart disease and cancer.

In therapy, dreamers are coached to rehearse positive versions of their most frequent and scariest imaginary experiences.

They can become regular occurrences - visiting us many times a week and affecting quality of life.

Now scientists have taken it a step further by also playing a sound linked to an uplifting daytime experience.

It was emitted through a wireless headband while participants were in the land of nod - reducing nightmare frequency.

"There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional wellbeing," said senior author Dr. Lampros Perogamvros, of the University of Geneva.

"Based on this observation, we had the idea 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."

Up to four percent of adults have chronic nightmares at any given moment which can make them wake up - and struggle to get back off.

Sufferers are commonly prescribed "imagery rehearsal therapy" which asks them to change the negative storyline toward a more positive ending.

They rehearse the rewritten outcome during the day. While effective, some cases are unresponsive.

So, Perogamvros and colleagues recruited 36 patients who were split into two groups - half of whom also got the sound exposure.

They were required to create an association between a positive version of their nightmare and a noise during an imagination exercise - which they practiced daily.

The skullcap sent the tones during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - the stage when nightmares mostly occur - for two weeks.

They fared better than participants who only received the imagery rehearsal therapy - without additional treatment.

All experienced a decrease in nightmares per week. But those given the combination had fewer - for at least three months. They also experienced more joy in their dreams.

"We were positively surprised by how well the participants respected and tolerated the study procedures, for example performing imagery rehearsal therapy every day and wearing the sleep headband during the night," Perogamvros said.

"We observed a fast decrease of nightmares, together with dreams becoming emotionally more 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 therapies."

The Swiss team say the results support that such combined therapy should be trialed on larger scales and with different kinds of populations.

This will determine the extent and generalisability of its efficiency.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.