How to Tame Your Nightmares
- JULY 20, 2010
In the new movie, “Inception,” a master thief is able to infiltrate peoples’ dreams and steal their subconscious secrets—even plant a dream idea they’ll think is their own.
As fantastical as that seems, an evolving area of sleep research holds that it is possible for people to direct their own dreams, in a limited way.
For example, people who suffer from recurring nightmares can learn to substitute happier endings. Practitioners of lucid dreaming—who train themselves to be aware that they are dreaming—say they can try out fantasies like flying.
Ordering up a dream about a nagging personal problem is difficult, but possible, says Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “As you go to bed tonight, really think about some of those emotional issues that you haven’t wanted to deal with. You’ve got about a 10% to 20% shot.”
That fits with the current understanding of what dreams are and why we have them. Once thought to represent repressed sexual urges, or simply neurons firing randomly, dreams are now believed to be mash-ups created by the unconscious mind as it processes, sorts and stores emotions from the day.
“We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night,” says Rosalind Cartwright, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has spent nearly 50 years studying sleep and dreams.
Her new book, “The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,” explains that the mind latches onto some thread of unfinished emotional business from the day. Then, in REM sleep (the rapid eye movement period when most dreaming occurs), it calls up bits of older memories that are somehow related, and melds them together. “That’s why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,” she says. “They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.”…
Solving the Puzzle
As the rebus above illustrates, dreams can contain cryptic messages. But these techniques, with practice, can help calm troubled sleep:
- Rewrite an Ending: While you are awake, imagine a happy conclusion to a recurring scary dream. Practice visualizing it several times a day and just before bedtime.
- Become Lucid: Ask yourself often during the day if you are dreaming; then do it at night. If you can become aware of dreaming while you are doing it, you may be able to dream whatever you want.
- Plan a Dream: Focus on an image, question or problem before you go to sleep. Look for a solution in your dreams—but it’s likely to be a metaphor.
- Interpret Meanings: Record every dream you remember in a diary before you get out of bed. Look for recurring themes. Gaining insight in your waking life may quiet a message in your dreams.
—Gordon Arnold