Whether it’s your teeth falling out or showing up to school without your pants on, nightmares aren’t fun. They’re especially awful when they happen frequently—turning what should be a restful night’s sleep into something you dread.
When recurring nightmares are especially bad, therapy can sometimes provide a solution. There’s no perfect form of treatment, but researchers are getting better and better. In fact, Swiss scientists have just come up with a new technique that allows you to manipulate your emotions while you sleep using sound.
That’s right. Just like in Inception.
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In a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the study’s authors developed a method where a sound associated with a good daytime feeling is played through a wearable headband. As you sleep, the sound plays through your ears and (hopefully) triggers peaceful dreams.
“There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional well-being,” Lampros Perogamvros, a sleep researcher at the University of Geneva and senior author of the paper, said in a press release. “Based on this observation, we had the idea that we could help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally very strong and very negative dreams in patients suffering from nightmares.”
It’s not as easy as just loading up a playlist of your favorite music for your nighttime slumber, however. This method is partnered with imagery rehearsal therapy, a process in which patients reimagine common nightmares to have a more positive outcome. Say you often dream that you show up to your high school unprepared for a test. You might rewrite that narrative to make sure that you ace it every time.
The new study recruited 36 patients suffering from frequent nightmares and provided them with imagery rehearsal therapy. Half were tasked with associating the positive outcome of their dreams with a sound produced by a wearable headband known as the Dreem. They then practiced this association daily for two weeks. The other half of the study cohort received only the imagery rehearsal therapy.
As the patients slept, the headband would also measure electrical signals in the brain, allowing it to start playing the sound during REM sleep—the point when most nightmares happen.
The results revealed that both groups showed a decrease in nightmares. However, the one that received sound therapy had fewer nightmares after the two weeks they were trained and as much as three months later. That group also reported happier dreams.
It should be noted that the sample size for the study was relatively small and recruited in Switzerland. The study’s authors recommend building off of this research with more participants to see if it can work better at scale. However, the results are very promising.
“We observed a fast decrease of nightmares, together with dreams becoming emotionally more positive,” Perogamvros said. “For us, researchers and clinicians, these findings are very promising both for the study of emotional processing during sleep and for the development of new therapies.”
So from the silver screen to your dreams, it turns out there was a little more truth to Inception after all. Just remember that if you start hearing Edith Piaf’s music playing, you should probably wake up as soon as you can.
