Nightmares Can Be Silenced With a Single Piano Chord, Scientists Discover

It might be possible to reduce the screaming horrors that plague our sleep by using non-violent techniques.

A study showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the number of bad dreams.

Scientists invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive light and then play sounds associated with positive experiences as they slept.

There is a correlation between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional well-being according to a psychiatrist.

We had the idea that we could help people by making them feel better in their dreams. We found that we can reduce the number of strong and negative dreams in patients who suffer from nightmares.

It isn't always a simple case of a few bad dreams for many people. Poor quality sleep is linked with a lot of other health issues.

Poor sleep can lead to insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies show that there has been an increase in nightmares and sleep problems during the current global outbreak of the disease.

It's difficult to treat chronic nightmares given that we don't really understand how our brain works.

In imagery rehearsal therapy patients rewrite their nightmares to give them a happy ending. They "rehearse" telling themselves a different story.

The method can reduce the severity of nightmares but not all patients will benefit from it.

Scientists found in 2010 that playing sounds that people have been trained to associate with a certain stimuli while they sleep helps boost the memory of that stimuli. They wanted to find out if this could improve the effectiveness of imagery rehearsal therapy.

Volunteers in the study were given a single IRT session after completing a dream and sleep diary.

Half of the group imagined a less horrible version of a nightmare without being exposed to sound.

When nightmares were most likely to occur, both groups received a sleep headband that played the piano C69 while they slept.

After two weeks of additional diary entries, the groups were evaluated again, and this time without any treatment.

The control group had an average of 2.58 nightmares per week, while the TMR group had an average of 2.98 nightmares per week. By the end of the study, the control group was down to 1.02 nightmares per week, while the TMR group was down to 0.19 nightmares per week. There has been an increase in happy dreams.

At the three-month follow-up, nightmares had gone up slightly in both groups. The researchers suggest that using TMR to support IRT results in a more effective treatment for nightmares.

"We were pleasantly surprised by how well the participants respected the study procedures, for example performing imagery rehearsal therapy every day and wearing the sleep headband during the night."

There was a rapid decrease of nightmares and dreams. The findings are very promising for the study of emotional processing during sleep as well as the development of new therapies.

The research has been published.