Science News reveals a new therapy based on memory exercises that shows promise in totally doing away with nightmare disorder:
Frequent, terrifying dreams disturb sleep and even affect well-being in waking life. The go-to nightmare disorder treatment is imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT. In this treatment, patients reimagine nightmares with a positive spin, mentally rehearsing the new story line while awake. It reduces nightmares for most but fails for nearly a third of people.
To boost IRT’s power, neuroscientist Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva and her colleagues leveraged a learning technique called targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. In this technique, a person focuses on learning something while a sound plays, and that same cue plays again during sleep. Experiencing the cue during sleep, which is important for memory storage, may reactivate and strengthen the associated memory (SN: 10/3/19).
In the new study, the researchers gave 36 people with nightmare disorder training in IRT, randomly assigning half of them to rehearse their revised nightmares in silence. The other half rehearsed while a short piano chord, the TMR cue, played every 10 seconds for five minutes.
For two weeks, participants practiced IRT daily and kept a dream diary. While they slept, a headband outfitted with sensors recorded their brains’ electrical activity and tracked their sleep stages. The piano chord served as a dream soundtrack, with the headband sounding off every 10 seconds during rapid eye movement, the sleep stage associated with dreaming. The headband played the sound for all participants, but only half had come to associate the sound with their new scenario during the IRT training.
For those trained on the chord, TMR nearly vanquished the nightmares, bringing the weekly average down from three to 0.2, and even encouraged happier dreams. The group that received only IRT improved too, but still averaged one weekly nightmare.
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You can read more of the Swiss study here, in Current Biology.