“The nightmare, defined as an extremely dysphoric dream, generally involving vital threats to safety or physical integrity, represents a common phenomenon”, introduce the researchers of the study “Treatment of the disease of nightmares” published on July 15 in the journal Médecine du Sommeil on the Science Direct website.
What is Nightmare Disease?
When nightmares become recurring to the point of having a negative impact on the person’s daily life, it is no longer just about “bad dreams”, we call it the disease of nightmares. It can then have an impact on the quality of sleep, causing insomnia, on the quality of life in general. The patient lacks rest, dwells on dark thoughts, tries by various means to sleep without having dysphoric dreams: by drinking alcohol, by consuming narcotics…
How to treat it?
Approaches derived from CBTs are proposed: cognitive and behavioral therapies, which are effective, explains the study. It is called imagery rehearsal therapy (RIM). The idea is to modify the emotional charge of the nightmare narrative, after the fact. “Mental imagery consists of modifying a pre-existing nightmare to create the scenario of a new dream which will be repeated daily during wakefulness”, explain the researchers.
Rewriting the script of his dream would help in 70% of cases
Besides, an article from the world evokes that this way of approaching the nightmare would reduce the distress associated with the nightmare story by 70%. A doctor testifies to having received a patient suffering from post-traumatic stress, resulting in dysphoric dreams and having a heavy consumption of alcohol in order to sleep. He was asked, each time he woke up from a nightmare, to rewrite the scenario of his dream by transforming all the negative elements into something festive. In this case, it is an explosion, which she visualized in the form of confetti, the article explains. Within just a few nights, the patient began to feel better, seeing the side effects of her nightmares fade away.
The sleep journal medical report clarifies that while RIM achieves the best results, there are other options to cure the nightmare disease. A pharmacological approach, in certain cases of post-traumatic stress, can be considered. Or other psychotherapeutic techniques : such as “exposure and desensitization therapies, therapies centered on lucid dreams, and to a lesser extent classical or specific cognitive behavioral therapies for insomnia”.
Sources: Treatments for Nightmare Disease, July 15, 2021, Science Direct; Le Monde Rewrite the scenario of its nightmares to heal from them, August 3, 2021.
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