Some people suffer from terrifying nightmares that take away sleep from their eyes and turn their lives into hell, as obsessions and fears dominate their mentality and haunt them wherever they go, and they fall prey to stress and nervous pressure.

And since these people usually remember the details of the dream, they avoid sleeping to escape facing terror, which in the long run affects their body with exhaustion and fatigue, and by learning how to deal with these nightmares, these people can get rid of them and lead their lives normally again.

negative feelings

Johanna Tunker, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, says, “One of the most important features of nightmares is that they put a person under the control of a group of bad, negative emotions. Often a person’s feelings of fear, anger, or even shame increase while experiencing nightmares, to the point that they wake up from the nightmares.” He fell asleep under the weight of these feelings.

And the head of the Institute for Consciousness and Dreams Research in the Austrian capital, Vienna, Brigitte Holtzinger, believes that one of the harms of nightmares is that it generates fears among some people about going to sleep in general, which makes them always postpone the bedtime, even if they are very tired and exhausted.

the reasons :

On the causes of nightmares, she says, “Nightmares are usually suffered by people who have had a real trauma in their lives, or who are living through a life situation that causes them to fall under nervous pressure.”

Scientists also believe that dreamy and hypersensitive people are more likely to suffer from nightmares.

The Austrian expert, Holtzinger, indicated that children between the ages of 4 and 12 usually suffer from nightmares during sleep, suggesting the reason for this by saying, “This may be due to the nature of the developmental stage that children go through during this age stage, which is characterized by continuous learning of new skills.” “.

treatment :

One of the most common methods used to treat nightmares is a treatment technique known as “dream reframing”. And about this technique, the German expert, Tunker, says, “In this way, people who suffer from nightmares assume the role of a movie director, as they try to compose a completely new ending for nightmares that is less terrifying than the original ending.”

The German expert explains how to do this, saying that the patient first writes down the details of the nightmare he experienced in his sleep, then selects the events that caused him to feel dread with the help of the psychotherapist, and then tries to replace these events with other, less terrifying fantasies.

Tunker stressed the importance of these new events being consistent with the events of the real nightmare as a whole, in order to represent an actual alternative to it. Tonkir gives an example of this by saying, “The patient replaces the dark parking lot with a well-lit one, or the frightening thing that haunts a person in his nightmares takes another route.”

After completing the replacement of the frightening nightmare events with less terrifying ones with the help of the psychotherapist, the patient writes down the new novel of the nightmare, provided that he reads it more than once a day for two weeks, just to remember the new novel.

Best styles:

Regarding the “dream reframing” technique, German Professor Michael Schreidel from the Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim says, “This technique is the best treatment for nightmares to date.”