Rewriting Your Nightmares

Rewriting Your Nightmares Halloween is filled with the stuff of nightmares — costumedTarps ghosts, vampires and slasher-movie monsters. But for some people, nightmares aren’t holiday fun. As many as 25 percent of adults have at least one nightmare a month. For a troubled 7 to 8 percent of the population, nightmares interrupt sleep at least once a week.

But many people don’t realize that having chronic nightmares is a medical problem that can be treated.

A nightmare is a complex dream that can cause high levels of anxiety and terror. Nightmares typically interrupt sleep as the mind plays out frightening scenes that involve imminent harm, like being chased, threatened or injured. For people who suffer from post-traumatic stress, nightmares tend to involve reliving the original horror of the traumatic event.

It’s believed that nightmares occur when the brain is struggling to process stress or severe trauma. But for some people, the bad dreams essentially become a learned behavior, and the brain gets stuck in a pattern of troubling nightmares.

In the past, therapists have encouraged patients to talk about their nightmares in hopes of resolving the underlying issues that cause them. But more recently, therapists have adopted “imagery rehearsal therapy,” a pioneering technique developed by Dr. Barry Krakow at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

Instead of focusing on the bad dream, imagery therapy looks for ways to rewrite a nightmare’s script. The concern is that talking too much about a troubling dream may serve to reinforce it. Imagery rehearsal therapy allows the dreamer to rewrite the nightmare during the day. After practicing basic imagery techniques — imagining yourself on a beach or eating a hamburger, for example — the troubled dreamer chooses a better version of the dream, explains Shelby Harris, clinical psychologist at the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center Tarpsat Montefiore Hospital in New York.