Scientists Prove a Single Piano Chord Can Reduce Nightmares

VIVA – A study conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies had reduced the frequency of their nightmares.

Scientist invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares, then play sounds associated with positive experiences as they slept.

According to the psychiatrist from the University Hospital of Geneva and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Lampros Perogamvros, states that there is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and human emotions.

"Based on this observation, we had the idea that we could help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally very strong and very negative dreams in patients suffering from nightmares." Perogamvros explained.

Many people suffer from nightmares and it is associated with poor sleep quality. Then, it is associated with several other health problems.

Poor sleep can also increase anxiety resulting in insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies have shown that bad dreams and sleep disturbances have increased during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Handling and treating chronic nightmares are something of a challenge that people have to go through. One of the non-invasive methods is imagery rehearsal therapy in which patients rewrite their most terrible nightmares to give them a happy ending.

Then they practice telling the rewritten story to themselves, trying to override the nightmare. This method can reduce the frequency and severity of nightmares, but the treatment is not effective for all patients.

In 2010, scientists found that playing a sound that had been trained to associate with a particular stimulus, while the person was asleep, helped improve memory of that stimulus.

This training is called targeted memory reactivation (TMR). Perogamvros and other researchers wanted to know if it could increase the effectiveness of image rehearsal therapy (IRT).

After the study’s participants completed a two-week dream and sleep diary, the volunteers were given one session of IRT. At this point, half of the group underwent a TMR session, creating a link between the positive version of their nightmare and the sound.

The other half served as a control group, imagining a less horrific version of a nightmare without being exposed to positive sounds.

Both groups received a sleep headphone headband that would play the sound, the piano chord C69, while they were sleeping, every 10 seconds during REM sleep when nightmares were most likely to occur.

The groups were evaluated after two weeks of additional diary entries, and then again after three months without any sort of treatment.

At the start of the study, the control group had, on average, 2.58 nightmares per week, and the TMR group had an average of 2.94 weekly nightmares.

By the end of the study, the control group was down to 1.02 weekly nightmares, while the TMR group had dropped to just 0.19. Even more promising, the TMR group reported an increase in happy dreams.