The nightmare treatment nobody mentions

✦ TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS

Change the ending

There is a treatment for recurring nightmares with better evidence behind it than anything else I have written about.

I HAD THIS ONE TOO

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TODAY’S SYMBOL

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WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST

Dear friend,

I had the same nightmare on and off for years and never once thought to do anything about it, because it had not occurred to me that a dream was the kind of thing you could act on.

It went away eventually, the way they often do, though I would rather have known then what I am about to tell you.

This is the best evidenced thing in any letter I have sent you, and it is also the least known, which is a strange combination for something this old.

So today is short on hedging and long on instructions, which does not happen often here.

What counts as one

A bad dream and a nightmare are separated by one thing, which is whether it wakes you. If you sleep through it, it was a bad dream. If it pulls you out and you come to knowing exactly what happened, that is the other kind.

Somewhere between two and eight in every hundred people have them often enough for it to count as a disorder, which is more people than any of them suppose, because almost nobody mentions it.

The ordinary sort is unpleasant and passes. The one that comes back is the one worth doing something about, and it is also the one that responds.

They travel with other things too, so if yours turned up alongside a hard year, that is worth saying to somebody rather than treating as a sleep problem standing on its own.

“	A nightmare is treated as something learned rather than something happening to you.

You can change the ending

The treatment is called imagery rehearsal, and the whole of it is this. You take the nightmare, you rewrite the ending while you are awake, and then you practise the new version in your head for a few minutes a day.

That is not a folk remedy. It is the only nightmare treatment carrying the top level of recommendation there is, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine names it the first thing to try, for the ordinary recurring kind and for the kind that follows trauma.

It can be learned in a single session, and the daily rehearsal takes five or ten minutes.

Underneath it is one simple idea. A nightmare is treated as something learned rather than something happening to you, which is the reason it can be changed at all.

How to try it, and when not to

Write the nightmare down in the morning, in the present tense, up to the point where it turns. Then change what happens next, and change it as far as you like, since it does not have to be plausible and it often works better when it is not.

Rehearse that new version once a day, awake, sitting down, for a few minutes. Not at bedtime and not while trying to drop off, because the point is to practise it rather than to summon it.

And the part I would not skip: if your nightmares came with something that happened to you, do this with a clinician rather than alone. It is normally taught in one to three sessions, and you will get further with somebody in the room than with a newsletter.

✦ WRITE BACK

Two kinds turn up in that inbox, the one that keeps coming back and the one that came with something. I would like to know which is yours.

TELL ME WHICH ONE

If you try the rewriting, tell me what you changed it to, since the endings people invent are the most interesting thing anybody sends me.

Sleep well,

Dream Signs

P.S. A reader told me once that she had rewritten hers so the door opened onto a supermarket, that it had worked, and that she still has no idea why a supermarket. If yours worked, tell me what you changed. She said it was simply the first thing she thought of.

✦ TONIGHT’S PRACTICE

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Write it up to the turn

In the morning, write the nightmare in the present tense up to the moment it goes bad, then stop there. That is the whole job. The ending comes later.

Tell me what you wrote

✦ MANIFESTATION TIP

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Rehearse it awake

Once a day, sitting down, run the new ending through in your head for a few minutes. Daytime, not bedtime, since the point is practice rather than summoning it.

What came back

✦ BEFORE YOU GO

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When it happens in daylight

If something turned up this week that matched a dream you had, that is the thing I most want to hear about, and the one people are shyest about sending.

Tell me what happened

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Dream it. Sign it. Live it.

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