Woooow: this sound makes your nightmares not so deadly scary anymore

Running along the pond at the Milky Way, through the alley behind my grandparents' house on Saturnuslaan to eventually hide in the backyard. I used to be chased at night by a bunch of unruly types with machine guns who had it in for me. With wicked plans in mind, let's just leave it at that.

I used to have this dream often. Or rather, a dream, feel free to call it a nightmare. Sometimes I even got the extended version, where they discovered me in the quaint backyard and I also had to swim quite a distance underwater to escape. Under the barrier (?) and just before the endpoint, I ran out of air and woke up. It wasn't exactly pleasant. But good news for people who are plagued by nightmares on a nightly basis: research shows that there is a sound that chases away those grim dreams.

Did you know that there are people who suffer from nightmare disorder? This means that you have at least one nightmare a week. The bad dreams are so intense that you are even tired and anxious during the day. In Switzerland, researchers came up with the solution: playing a soft piano sound. People with nightmare disorder were fitted with a headband. The moment the dream began, the sound started automatically. A condition for the positive turn was that they first linked a positive version of the dream to this sound. The result: the nightmares stayed away for at least three months. A solution for people who were worn out from the nerves due to the terrifying chases, falling teeth, or ravines they fell into.

How does it work? By using imagery rehearsal therapy. In this treatment, you repeat the positive outcome of the dream every day. You essentially rewrite the script of an unpleasant scenario. Psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros combined this therapy with targeted memory reactivation, where you link a sound or smell to an experience. Enter: the piano chord C69. It took a while for the dreams to take a positive turn, but in most cases, the nightmares decreased immediately.

So are you fed up with that nightmare? There is a treatment on the way that works. Even psychologist Jaap Lancee from the University of Amsterdam is enthusiastic to De Standaard: ‘You see a serious extra effect of memory reactivation, on top of the effect of IRT.’ It is now just a matter of testing on more groups, but in the future, it could very well provide a solution for that bad dream.

Source: De Standaard