The hallway is dark, the atmosphere tense, a noise echoes a few meters away from you. Then a shadow appears, an assassin with an evil smile who sets out after you; but you have trouble escaping him, you seem to be stuck in the ground, unable to run, and when the blade of his knife plunges on you… you wake up. Fortunately, it was just a nightmare. However, the impacts of a nightmare on health can be very real:fatigue, stress, latent fear, which can go as far as depression. So is there a way to influence or even stop his nightmares?
Given how disturbing and stressful nightmares can be, is there a way for dreamers to avoid, or even stop, these bad dreams as they occur? The state of research is currently limited, but some studies suggest that people who can master lucid dreaming — that is, the ability to be aware that a dream is occurring and control it without waking — may hold the answer.
Nightmares are part of the human experience, especially for children. Doctors don't usually consider occasional nightmares a problem, but there are options for people whose nightmares occur frequently and negatively affect their daytime lives. These can be symptoms of a nightmare disorder, a sleep disorder that can result from trauma, stress, and certain medications.
To treat nightmare disorders, there are a number of medications and therapies that are backed by rigorous research, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine , which analyzed available research on the treatment of nightmare disorders in a 2010 study published in the journal Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine .
However, nightmares are complicated and researchers are still struggling to understand them, says Rachel Salas, sleep disorders expert and associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins. What we do know is that people tend to experience different types of nightmares at different times in the sleep cycle.
Many dreams occur during the phase of sleep called REM sleep. This phase is most likely to produce dreams in which we do things "we don't normally do", such as stealing. Analyzes show that the brain activity of people in REM sleep resembles that of people who are awake.
People typically begin REM sleep about 90 minutes after falling asleep, and in some ways a body entering REM sleep appears to wake up; you begin to breathe faster and more irregularly, your heart rate and blood pressure increase. It may seem like the body is preparing to move, but the brain has developed a clever mechanism to protect dreamers from themselves. Indeed, when we enter REM sleep, our muscle activity decreases.
Related:Why do people continue to have nightmares as adults?
It is possible to achieve lucid dreams, but there have not been enough trials to establish lucid dream therapy as an accepted medical practice. That said, research published over the past decade has supported the possibility that such therapy may help people who suffer from persistent nightmares, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology .
If you want to try lucid dreaming, you can try the following strategy, known as "Wake back to bed “, according to Sérgio Arthuro Mota-Rolim, researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande. First, set an alarm 30 minutes before the time you normally wake up. But when the alarm goes off, don't get up. Instead, consider having a lucid dream while going back to sleep.
It's not a guarantee, but it does increase the chances that you'll have a lucid dream, says Arthuro. It's also a good idea to think about it or talk about it the night before, because dreams are very suggestible. If you can realize you're in a nightmare, the easiest way to stop it is to wake up. But some evidence suggests it's possible to stay in the nightmare but eliminate your fear knowing you're not in physical danger. Some study participants even reported turning a nightmare into a more pleasant dream.
An obvious obstacle to lucid dreaming is that lucid dreams are not common. While most people have had a lucid dream at some point, the average person will have fewer than 10 in their lifetime. One of the reasons so little research has been done on lucid dream therapy is that researchers are still exploring the most effective ways to induce lucid dreams. For example, researchers reported in 2014 that using certain frequencies of electrical stimulation can increase the likelihood of a dreamer becoming aware that they are dreaming. To explore further:Induce lucid dreams at will? A new method might allow this.
