REEDSPORT, Ore. – Imagine if you could control your dreams so nightmares would not come back and bother you; thus, it’s now possible say psychologists to do just that with certain techniques.
Jerry says he often has a dream – that becomes a nightmare -- of a blue house on a lake; while later admitting that his fragile soul couldn’t bear the black memories that had scorched it “years ago” at this family retreat that, in fact, was a “blue house that my family had at a lake.” Thanks to something called “lucid dreaming,” Jerry and millions of other Americans are now able to confront the demons that plague them in their dreams. In turn, dream experts are featured in the recent January edition of Popular Science stating the best place to start sorting out your good, bad and even strange dreams “is right before bed,” explained Deirdre Barrett, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of the “The Committee of Sleep,” that asked 76 college students to choose a problem (where to take a vacation; how to arrange their furniture) and focus on it while falling asleep. When it comes to problem solving, getting enough sleep “may truly be the secret to success,” adds other sleep experts who think dreams may be the key to a variety of health and life woes that people can easily solve if they just “know how to dream.”
Dreams: still a mystery of the mind
A recent webmd.com report stated that “sometimes dreams make a lot of sense -- like when we’ve been working hard and we end up dreaming, alas, that we’re still at work. Other times the meaning of dreams is less clear. That doesn’t mean the dream isn’t important to our well-being, however.”
For instance, the webmd.com report noted the case of Kate Miller, the owner of Charlie’s Playhouse, a maker of science education toys. “Miller had been wrestling with a problem for weeks. But one morning the answer popped into her mind as she woke up. She wanted to design a game that would teach kids about natural selection while letting them run around and have fun.”
Also, dream therapy helped Jerry, a retired logger and Vietnam veteran who lives in Reedsport, Oregon. “I put what happened to me in that blue house on the lake somewhere deep. I would dream about it and awake in cold sweats,” he explained during a recent Huliq interview with veterans who are sharing coping strategies at a local VA clinic.
In turn, Jerry said “the abuse I suffered in that blue house is now out in the open. I no longer dream about it.”
Dreams help one cope with stress
The dream -- likely a means of coping with a major life stress – that helped Jerry and thousands of others, is also explained in a recent webmd.com health report that features Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, professor emeritus of psychology at Rush University in Chicago who says: “It’s almost like having an internal therapist, because you associate [through dreams] to previous similar feelings, and you work through the emotion related to it so that it is reduced by morning.”
Also, the report explains that “although some researchers believe dreams are just a byproduct of sleep, others think dreams are important for memory consolidation or conflict resolution. Cartwright has found clues to suggest that dreams may help with mood regulation.”
“Dreams occur during both REM (rapid-eye-movement) and non-REM sleep, but sleep studies show that brain activity is heightened during REM periods. When sleep-study participants are wakened during the first non-REM period, those who recall their dreams tend to report thinking about a piece of emotional unfinished business. The dreamer may then restate or reshape the problem in a different form during the next REM cycle, and so on, through the night,” added the webmd.com report.
New breakthroughs in dream research
Imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT, is a more active, daytime method of dream influence that psychologists use to help trauma victims prevent recurring nightmares, states a recent report in Popular Science titled “Is it Possible to Control Our Dreams?”
In turn, the report answers this question with data that “nightmares affect some three million people in the U.S. who suffer from post-traumatic stress.”
Also, one way to help people with these nightmares – such as Jerry from Reedsport – is to have “participants write out a happy version of the nightmare—in place of a fanged monster, a puppy; instead of a dark alley, a sunny street—and visualize it for 15 minutes a day. A group of patients in the VA San Diego Healthcare System who completed a course in IRT therapy experienced 33 percent fewer nightmares after five weeks,” added this recent Popular Science report.
Lucid dreaming opens the doors of perception
Another dream method is called “lucid dreaming.”
Popular Science explains that “during a lucid dream, it’s possible to act rather than simply react, explains Jane Gackenbach, a professor of psychology at Grant MacEwan University in Alberta and the author of Play Reality. About 58 percent of people have experienced a lucid dream at least once, she says. Gackenbach has investigated military videogames as a way to help soldiers cope with combat-related nightmares. “
“In their military dreams, soldiers who rarely played video games couldn’t pull the trigger,” she says. “They were helpless in the face of danger.” But gamers could hide behind a boulder and shoot and fight back.
Dream control is inexact, though. In fact, it's very difficult to sort out; with more than a thousand years of experts throughout history trying to figure out what dreams mean, and if there is another realm of "reality" in the dream state.
As Robert Waggoner, the author of “Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self,” puts it in the recent Popular Science report: “The sailor does not control the sea, and neither does the lucid dreamer control the dream.” Gackenbach, too, has found that her subconscious has a way of fighting back: “I was sitting on a bench in Central Park, and I knew I was dreaming. A beautiful woman in a white hat was walking by. I decided to try to change her hat into a monster, but I couldn’t. Instead, she changed into a wolf and bit me.”
Lucid dreaming helps fight depression
Another benefit of understanding dreaming, say mental health experts, is that dreams help with fighting depression. Thus, one needs to first get at least eight hours of sleep. While this may not sound possible for most Americans who seem to be “still wired to their tech gadgets,” that are proven to disturb sleep patterns, a good night’s sleep is key to good health and fighting depression.
In brief, proper sleep is without a doubt one of the most important needs of a person needs besides food and shelter.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, “humans spend more than two hours dreaming each night (with the most vivid dreams occurring during REM sleep). Rats deprived of that precious REM sleep for four days produce fewer nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center."
Among humans, dreaming may also help alleviate depression, adds webmd.com ; while noting that “in sleep studies of recently divorced women with untreated clinical depression, Cartwright and colleagues found that patients who recalled dreams and incorporated the ex-spouse or relationship into their dreams scored better on tests of mood in the morning. And they were much more likely to recover from depression than others who either did not dream about the marriage or could not recall their dreams.”
“It really shows that there was an ongoing working through the night in the dream material, and eventually that the depression lifted in those people,” Professor Cartwright says; while Jerry, the retired logger from Reedsport, adds: “When I think of all those sleepless nights I had just because I never confronted my dreams it's just crazy. I now understand my past mental anguish of being abused.”
Image source of a “blue house on a lake” near Reedsport, Oregon. Photo by Dave Masko
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