Scientists discover nightmares can be silenced with a single piano chord

We use non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions might be possible to stem the screaming horrors that plague our sleep.

A study conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the frequency of their bad dreams.

The scientists invited the volunteers to put their most common nightmares in a positive light and then play sounds associated with positive experiences while they slept.

“There is a relationship between the types of emotions we experience in dreams and our emotional well-being,” says psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the Geneva University Hospitals and University of Geneva in Switzerland.

“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 with nightmares.”

Many people suffer from nightmares that aren’t always just a bunch of bad dreams. Nightmares are also linked to poor sleep quality, which in turn is linked to a whole host of other health problems.

Poor sleep can also increase anxiety, which in turn can lead to insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies have shown that nightmares and sleep disturbances have increased during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Given that we don’t really understand why or even how our brain creates dreams while we sleep, treating chronic nightmares is a challenge.

One non-invasive method is Imaginational Rehearsal Therapy, in which patients rewrite their most distressing and common nightmares to give them a happy ending. Then they “rehearse” telling themselves this rewritten story and try to rewrite the nightmare.

This method can reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares, but the treatment is not effective in all patients.

In 2010, scientists found that playing sounds that people trained to associate with a specific stimulus while those people were sleeping AIDS in enhancing recall of that stimulus. This was called Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR), and Perogamvros and colleagues wanted to see if it could improve the effectiveness of Imaginational Rehearsal Therapy (IRT).

After study participants kept a dream and sleep diary for two weeks, all volunteers received a single IRT session. At that point, half the group underwent a TMR session, which connected a positive version of their nightmares to a noise.

The other half served as a control group, imagining a less terrifying version of a nightmare without exposure to positive sounds.

Both groups received a sleep headband that played the tone – the piano chord C69 – while sleeping every 10 seconds during REM sleep, when nightmares were most likely to occur.

TThe groups were evaluated aafter two weeks of additional diary entries and then again after three months without any treatment.

At the start of the study, the control group had an average of 2.58 nightmares per week and the TMR group had an average of 2.94 nightmares per week. By the end of the study, the control group had dropped to 1.02 weekly nightmares, while the TMR group had dropped to just 0.19. Even more promisingly, the TMR group reported an increase in happy dreams.

At the three-month follow-up, nightmares had increased slightly in both groups to 1.48 and 0.33 per week, respectively. However, this is still an impressive reduction in the frequency of nightmares, the researchers said, and suggested that using TMR to support IRT results in a more effective treatment.

“We were pleasantly surprised at how well the participants respected and tolerated the study procedures, such as the daily imagery trial therapy and wearing the sleep headband during the night,” says Perogamvros.

“We observed a rapid decrease in nightmares, along with dreams becoming more emotionally positive. For us, researchers and clinicians, these results hold great promise both for studying emotional processing during sleep and for developing new therapies.”

The team’s research was published in Current Biology.