I'm a world-leading sleep specialist, here's how you can banish nightmares FOREVER by 'hacking' into them READ MORE: I'm a sleep psychologist - this is what your dreams REALLY mean By Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com Published: 18:50 EDT, 22 May 2024 | Updated: 18:52 EDT, 22 May 2024 e-mail View comments Sleep scientists have found the key to unlocking good dreams and banishing bad ones. Prominent sleep researcher Dr Matt Walker discussed the cutting-edge hack to happier dreams, which sees sufferers rewrite the terrifying ending to their nightmare to become neutral or even positive and practice playing out that new version in their heads while awake until it takes hold in their sleep.
Roughly 85 percent of the population experiences a nightmare at least once a year, but an unlucky subset of about four percent gets nightmares weekly or even nightly. While many are able to brush off the lingering negative effects of waking up from a disturbing dream and proceed with their day as normal, many others may find those feelings hard to shake, especially when the bad dreams become a weekly or nightly occurrence. The practice is particularly helpful for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 96 percent of whom are likely to be stricken with terrible dreams in which they re-live aspects of their traumatic event.
People who practiced this method, known as imagery rehearsal therapy, were able to flip the script of their nightmares to make them less sca.