Swiss researchers discover how soft piano sounds can help get rid of nightmares

A mad dash in a frighteningly deep ravine, attacked by menacing guys with a knife – nightmares are horrifyingly realistic. And people with nightmare disorder have at least one a week. They are also exhausted and anxious during the day.

Swiss researchers have found a new way to get rid of these unnerving bad dreams. Their patients were given a wireless headband that made a sound at night as soon as they started dreaming. That sound was pre-paired with a positive version of the nightmare, which the dreamer had come up with himself. The nightmares had been gone for at least three months, the researchers wrote last week the scientific journal Current biology.

Nightmare disorder can haunt a person for decades. People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often suffer from it, but the disorder also occurs without someone having experienced a traumatic event. About 1 in 25 people suffer from it. The most well-founded treatment is Trial image therapy (IRT). In doing so, the dreamer invents a version of the nightmare that ends well and repeats this rewritten scenario for five or ten minutes every day. This therapy works well, but in about a third of patients it doesn’t work and sometimes the nightmares return after a few weeks.

A sound or a smell

Psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the University of Geneva decided to combine IRT with a well-known technique: the reactivation of targeted memory. During the day an experience is related to a sound or a smell. If someone is exposed to that sound or smell at night during deep sleep, learning is better maintained. Perogamvros applied this technique during REM sleep (rapid eye movement), the sleep phase in which people dream.

The study involved 36 people who had nightmares with no traumatic cause, two to four times a week. They were examined by a sleep expert and kept a dream diary and a sleep diary for two weeks. On a second hospital visit, each participant came up with a positive version of their most common nightmare and imagined it for five minutes. Half of the participants heard a headphone sound every ten seconds during this repetition of the positive script: the C69 piano chord, for one second.

Over the next two weeks, all participants were given a sling to take home to wear while sleeping. Among other things, it recorded their brain waves and, as soon as REM sleep began, it played that chord every ten seconds – softly, but in such a way that the sleeper could barely hear it, at a volume of about 40 decibels. They also kept diaries and practiced the positive script for five minutes each day.

The positive story

After two weeks, nightmares were less frequent in people whose positive history was related to the piano chord. On average, they still suffered from their nightmare once a month, people who had only done IRT once a week. The deal group also had other positive dreams much more often, the control group did not.

After three months, that difference was still there. The frequency of nightmares was slightly increased again, but was still lower in both groups than before treatment.

“A very interesting and elegantly designed study, thinks Jaap Lancee, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam who specializes in nightmares. “You see a serious additive effect of memory reactivation, in addition to the effect of IRT.”

The Swiss emphasize that patients do not suddenly dream of the new funny version of the nightmare. “You see it in IRT,” says Lancee, “the positive story doesn’t replace it, but the nightmare script is no longer activated. The emotional charge has become less strong and as a result you don’t miss that story anymore.”

Before the new insights reach therapeutic practice, the study must be repeated, even in people with psychiatric disorders who often experience nightmares, such as PTSD. Lancee: “If it works in this clinical group, I’d say use it now.”

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