Article  The science of fighting our nightmares

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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ho...nightmares

EXCERPTS: . . . “If you can become lucid during a nightmare you can change your response or do something that empowers you in real time and improve your capacity to cope with the nightmare,” Denholm Aspy, a researcher in psychology at the University of Adelaide, told the BBC. Research backs this claim. A preliminary study coauthored in 2003 by Victor Spoormaker from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry found Lucid Dreaming Therapy (LDT) to be “effective in reducing nightmare frequency” and concluded “a single two-hour session of LDT led to a modest but significant reduction.”

But how exactly do we learn to confront our nightmares? Responses range from simply realizing you’re dreaming and thus feeling less threatened, to escaping whatever demon your subconscious has created, to confronting it head-on. To me, this sounded too good (and cool) to be true. Could you really physically fight your demons?

[...] Awareness of our dreams is all well and good, but how do you use it to, you know, send Freddy Krueger back to Hell? In 2019, a team [ursl=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02618/full]writing in Frontiers in Science[/url] looked at various efforts to control nightmares dating as far back as 1982. One well-established but non-lucid technique, known as “imagery rehearsal therapy,” encourages patients to rehearse alternate outcomes for their nightmares during waking hours, with the goal of the subconscious automatically changing what happens to you in the dream. LDT, in a way, adds lucidity to this approach, allowing you to alter it in real time. After achieving lucidity in a nightmare, you “face the source of fear, such as monsters,” the Frontiers paper says. Simply confronting the monster with the awareness that it cannot hurt you, this tactic demonstrated, can end the nightmare. No epic fight required (he typed begrudgingly).

These techniques have had dramatic effects [...] These are incredible results, but more research on LDT is needed. After all, nightmares themselves hold more mysteries. Even at this moment, Holzinger is hard at work trying to figure out how dreams are influenced by external stimuli. (You know how when it’s cold in your bedroom, you’re cold in your nightmares? Yeah, science doesn’t totally know what’s up with that yet.)

In the meantime, nightmares continue to plague us. Maybe not to the degree Ishiyama feared, and certainly not to the degree Freddy Krueger wants, but a real problem nonetheless... (MORE - missing details)
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