Sleep therapy could offer relief to people suffering from PTSD

Nightmares, for most, are a disturbing reality that lingers well into adulthood. Most of the time you can ignore that uncomfortable feeling, roll over, and go back to sleep, but sometimes the haunting of your dreams stays with you in waking life, making it difficult to go back to sleep.

What if you could control your dreams and turn them into something else? Doctors and researchers at the Maimonides Center for Sleep Sciences and Arts PTSD Sleep Clinic are doing just that.

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have nightmares much more often than others. Dreams are more intense and more vivid. Researchers are working with awake patients to alter the plot of their dreams. Turn a racing car into a frolicking pony, an intense situation into a relaxing one, and your nightmare becomes a dream.

This technique is called dream mastery or scripting. As part of imaging rehearsal therapy, it is being used to treat not only people with PTSD, but also everyone who suffers from nightmares.

Although dream mastery does not eliminate nightmares in all patients, it does help reduce the intensity and frequency of bad dreams.

However, not everyone agrees with the technique. Dreams have been researched a lot recently and scientists have found that they work to archive important memories and discard old ones. Opponents of dream mastery fear that the content of nightmares, while graphic and disturbing, is necessary for the proper storage of memories in the brain. Jungian psychologists in particular are against scripts because they fear that changing parts of the dream will take away your chance to read what your subconscious is telling you.

Less than 10% of adults report having nightmares up to once a week, but those who have had traumatic life experiences, such as soldiers and rape victims, report having nightmares at a much higher rate, 90%. The goal is not to disturb everyone’s dreams, but rather to allow peace at night for those whose sleep is regularly interrupted.