How To Tame Your Nightmares
Recently, an evolving area of sleep research holds that it is possible for people to direct their own dreams, in a limited way.For example, people who suffer from recurring nightmares can learn to substitute happier endings. Practitioners of lucid dreaming ( who train themselves to be aware that they are dreaming ) say they can try out fantasies like flying.
Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School says, 'As you go to bed tonight, really think about some of those emotional issues that you haven't wanted to deal with. You've got about a 10% to 20% shot.'
'We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night,' says Rosalind Cartwright, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has spent nearly 50 years studying sleep and dreams.Her new book, 'The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,' explains that the mind latches onto some thread of unfinished emotional business from the day. Then, in REM sleep (the rapid eye movement period when most dreaming occurs), it calls up bits of older memories that are somehow related, and melds them together. 'That's why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,' she says. 'They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.'
People usually wake up before the frightening emotion is resolved, so the dream keeps repeating.'Your brain seems to think that it's helping you to prepare, but you don't allow yourself to finish it so it becomes a broken record,' says Shelby Freedman Harris, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y.
Dr. Harris's program is one of a small number around the country that helps nightmare sufferers and people with post-traumatic stress disorder learn to rewrite the script of their recurring dreams using a technique called Image Rehearsal Therapy.
Dr. Harris says one of her patients had recurring nightmares of being surrounded by sharks. She imagined they were dolphins instead and rehearsed the scene during five sessions, and the nightmares vanished.