According to recent research, sound therapy could help avoid nightmares. These scary scenarios, according to researchers in Switzerland, can include being pursued, seeing demons and monsters, and witnessing something terrible occurs to a loved person.
Dementia, cancer, and heart disease are just a few significant ailments linked to sleep deprivation. In treatment, dreamers are encouraged to practice uplifting variations of their most common and frightful fantasies.
They can frequently occur, stopping by dreamers several times per week, and negatively impact the quality of life. Researchers have gone one step ahead by including a sound associated with a joyful daylight experience. They reduced the frequency of nightmares by emitting this sound via a wireless headpiece while subjects slept.
Senior study author Lampros Perogamvros, a psychiatrist at the Sleep Laboratory of the Geneva University Hospitals, said there is a link between the emotions someone experiences in dreams and our emotional well-being.
This observation suggested that influencing the emotional content of people’s dreams could help them. In the study, researchers demonstrate that they can help patients with nightmares have fewer emotionally intense and negatively charged dreams.
Around 4% of adults experience chronic nightmares at any particular moment that can make them wake up and struggle to get back to sleep. As a result, healthcare providers frequently recommend “imagery rehearsal therapy,” which instructs patients to adapt the bad plot to a more uplifting conclusion.
Imagery reversal therapy involves practicing a revised result during the day. Despite being effective, some patients don’t respond. Based on this, Dr. Perogamvros and associates enrolled 36 patients into two groups and exposed half the group to sound therapy.
They created a link between the nightmare’s positive version and noise during an imagination task practiced daily. Patients that receive sound therapy fare well than those receiving imagery rehearsal therapies. Study authors say that individuals that received sound therapy had fewer nightmares for at least three months.