Scientists Prove a Single Piano Chord Can Reduce Nightmares
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VoxPop – A study conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies had reduced the frequency of their nightmares.
Scientist invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares, then play sounds associated with positive experiences as they slept.
According to the psychiatrist from the University Hospital of Geneva and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Lampros Perogamvros, states that there is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and human emotions.
"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." Perogamvros explained.
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- U-Report
Many people suffer from nightmares and it is associated with poor sleep quality. Then, it is associated with several other health problems.
Poor sleep can also increase anxiety resulting in insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies have shown that bad dreams and sleep disturbances have increased during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Handling and treating chronic nightmares are something of a challenge that people have to go through. One of the non-invasive methods is imagery rehearsal therapy in which patients rewrite their most terrible nightmares to give them a happy ending.
Then they practice telling the rewritten story to themselves, trying to override the nightmare. This method can reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares, but the treatment is not effective for all patients.
In 2010, scientists found that playing a sound that had been trained to associate with a particular stimulus, while the person was asleep, helped improve memory of that stimulus.
This training is called targeted memory reactivation (TMR). Perogamvros and other researchers wanted to know if it could increase the effectiveness of image rehearsal therapy (IRT).
