Sleep scientists have found the key to unlocking good dreams and banishing bad ones.
Leading sleep researcher Dr. Matt Walker discussed the cutting edge trick 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 takes hold while they sleep.
About 85 percent of the population experiences a nightmare at least once a year, but an unfortunate subset of about four percent has nightmares weekly or even every night.
While many may ignore the lingering negative effects of waking up from a disturbing dream and continue with their day as normal, many others may find it difficult to shake off those feelings, especially when bad dreams become a weekly or nightly occurrence.
The practice is particularly helpful for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 96 percent of whom are likely to suffer from terrible dreams in which they relive aspects of their traumatic event.
People who practiced this method, known as imagery rehearsal therapy, could rescript their nightmares to make them less frightening, or even eliminate them entirely in just a couple of weeks.
Leading sleep scientist Dr. Matt Walker told Dr. Andrew Huberman on his podcast that imagery rehearsal therapy is a very effective way to hack nightmares to give them new, pleasurable endings. Photo courtesy of the Huberman Lab podcast
This modality, first developed in 1978, involves a patient writing down and discussing with a therapist their most common distressing nightmare in as much detail as possible and exploring possible stressors in that person’s life that might be driving different disturbing aspects of the dream.
The patient then, 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, you are driving towards a busy intersection and the traffic light turns red. But instead of slowing the car gradually, the brakes do not respond to foot movement.
Shortly after, he crosses the intersection and is hit by another car. The impact wakes him up but it stays with him for the rest of the day.
In an image rehearsal therapy session, I would rewrite the nightmare and give it a new ending. Maybe the brakes don’t respond to the pressure under her foot.
But instead, I could mentally rehearse reaching out to pull the parking brake and slowly stop the car before reaching the deadly intersection.
A patient will go through this with a therapist, but it requires 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 absorbs 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 alternative ending, essentially what you’re trying to do is that every time you reactivate the memory of the traumatic car accident, and then you rehearse this alternative ending, it’s like I entered the Word document and edited the section that was really horrible and bad, and replaced it with something that is neutral or even positive.’
Memory consolidation is how the brain converts short-term memory into long-term memory during REM sleep.
REM, or rapid eye movement, is one of the four phases of sleep in which dreams occur. IRT takes advantage of this memory consolidation process to replace the old, distressing dream with a new one.
Dr. Walker added: “I’ll come back the next day and do more editing and more updating, and over and over again, gradually, the narrative that’s fixed inside the brain and the nightmare dissipates.” the frequency decreases in proportion.’
This method to overcome nightmares proved 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 were less distressing.
A follow-up study increased those efficacy rates even further. Scientists in Switzerland carried out the same experiment, but when some of the patients described the new endings to their dreams, the therapists played a nice piano chord. This was repeated several times.
Then, when these patients went to sleep at night, doctors placed headphones on them through which the soft piano chord played as they entered REM.
Adding that simple, pleasant piano chord increased the effectiveness of TRI from 64 percent and reduced the frequency of nightmares to about 92 percent.
After just two weeks, people who listened to the sound while awake while rehearsing their new dreams in their minds had fewer nightmares per week and were more likely to experience joyful dreams.