A note played to people when they rehearse positive dream stories can banish nightmares when played back to them during REM sleep. | Illustration: Sophie Schwartz

Many people are haunted by nightmares night after night. But help is now at hand. During Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, affected persons rewrite their negative dreams into beautiful stories when they’re awake, and these gradually displace the original nightmares when they sleep.

But this can be made to function even better. Researchers from the University of Geneva played a note to 18 people as they were rehearsing their positive dream stories. They then played the participants the same note during the REM phase of sleep when nightmares usually occur. Within two weeks on average, the frequency of nightmares suffered by the test subjects dropped to almost zero. The members of a control group who were given conventional treatment were afflicted four times more often.

“This new therapy could also be useful for other conditions that affect sleep”, says Lampros Perogamvros, the psychiatrist who led the study. “It could perhaps be used for insomnia or post-traumatic stress disorder”.

S. Schwartz et al.: Enhancing imagery rehearsal therapy for nightmares with targeted memory reactivation. Current Biology (2022)