Scientists Can Silence Nightmares with a Single Piano Chord: ScienceAlert

Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions it may be possible to reduce the screaming fears that haunt our sleep.

A study of 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder showed that the combination of two simple treatments reduced the frequency of bad dreams.

The scientists challenged the volunteers to rewrite their most common nightmares in a positive light and then play the sounds associated with positive experiences while they sleep.

“There is a correlation between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional health,” says psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the University Hospitals of Geneva and the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

“Based on this observation, we came to the idea that we can help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally strong and very negative dreams in patients with nightmares.”

Many people suffer from nightmares that are not always a simple case of a few bad dreams. Nightmares are also associated with poor quality sleep, which is linked to a host of other health problems.

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

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

A non-invasive method is phantom rehearsal therapy, in which patients rewrite their most distressing and frequent nightmares to give them a happy ending. Then they “rehearse” by telling the rewritten story to themselves, trying to overwrite the nightmare.

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

In 2010, scientists discovered that playing sounds that people are trained to associate with a particular stimulus while these people sleep, AIDS in strengthening the memory of this stimulus. This has been called targeted memory reactivation (TMR), and Perogamvros and colleagues wanted to find out if it could improve the effectiveness of image rehearsal therapy (IRT).

After the study participants kept a dream and sleep diary for two weeks, all of the volunteers received a single IRT session. At this point, half of the group underwent a TMR session, creating a link between a positive version of their nightmare and a voice.

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

Both groups were given a sleeping headset headband that would play a sound – piano chord C69 – every 10 seconds during REM sleep, when they are most likely to have nightmares.

Tgroups were evaluatedafter two weeks of additional diary entries and then three months without any treatment.

At the start of the study, the control group averaged 2.58 nightmares per week and the TMR group averaged 2.94 nightmares per week. At the end of the study, the control group dropped to 1.02 weeks of nightmares, while the TMR group dropped to just 0.19. Even more promising, the TMR group reported an increase in happy dreams.

At three-month follow-up, nightmares increased slightly in both groups to 1.48 and 0.33 per week, respectively. That said, this is still an impressive reduction in nightmare frequency, the researchers said, suggesting that using TMR to supplement IRT results in a more effective treatment.

“We were positively surprised by how much the participants respected and tolerated the study procedures, for example performing image rehearsal therapy every day and wearing the sleeping patch overnight,” says Perogamvros.

“We have observed that nightmares decrease rapidly as dreams become more emotionally positive. For us researchers and clinicians, these findings are very promising both for studies of emotional processing during sleep and for the development of new therapies.”

The team’s research has been published Current Biology.