How to Tame Your Nightmare?

In the movie Inception, the skilled thief can sneak into people’s dream, and steal their secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. They can even plant idea into people’s mind, and make them believe it is a part of their dream.

Just like the fantastic imagination of this movie, an evolving field of sleep research believes that people can direct their own dreams, but this ability is limited. For example, people who often have nightmare can reverse the bad ending by another joyful dream. Waking dreamer--people who know what they dream—referred that they can fantasy flying in the dream.

According to Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry in Harvard Medical School, it is difficult but not impossible to control annoying personal problem in the dream. “If you ever thought about some emotional problems which you didn’t want to deal with before went to bed, you might have about 10%~20%’s chance to dream about them at night.” He said.

This theory matches with current understanding to the reason of dream. It was once said that dreams were repressed sexual impulses, or just random neurons discharging activities. But now people think that dreams are the mixture products of the subconscious processing, classification and storage of the emotional in the day.

“We brought questions into our dream after sleeping, and dealt with them at night,” said Rosalind Cartwright, the emeritus professor of neurology of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. She has spelt nearly 50 years on sleeping and dreaming research. Her new publishing book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, explained that our thought attached to the unfinished emotional issue’s clues in the day. Then, in rapid eye movement sleep (most dreams happened in rapid eye movement period), it will evoke some memories of old relationships, and blended them together. “This is why dream is fantastic. It combines your new and old memories,” she said, “this connection is emotionally not logically.”

Usually, people will solve the negative emotion first, and when time is passing, the dream will become positive. But, nightmare will interrupt this process and wake dreamer up before fear is relieved. So the dream is repeated.

In Montefiore Medical Center, New York, Bronx, some projections are researched to cure nightmare patients and post-traumatic stress disorder patients. They use a solution that is so-called "Image rehearsal therapy" to change their recurring dreams. Patients are required to recall the details of the nightmare, writing new scripts, and imaging them several times in the day. For example, a patient always dreamed being surrounded by sharks repeatedly in nightmare. Then she thought they were dolphins, not sharks. After five courses’ rehearsal in this same scene, the nightmare disappeared. Another patient dreamed being shot, and then he imagined the gun as a laser pointer, and he had a lot fun with it. 

This method can help dreamer reverse the bad ending of nightmare, and finally change it to the funny and joyful ending as they imagined, then creates a new dream, or even stops nightmare.