Dr Michelle Carr

speaker

145 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Dr Michelle Carr’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Weekly · Revisited: The surprising science of dreams and nightmares · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

You know, it's also depends on the person.

I mean, some people are more likely to develop nightmares in response to stress.

And it seems to be especially people who are more maybe emotionally sensitive or even what we call they have high sensory sensitivity.

So they're likely to have very vivid imagination.

So it's almost like,

They have really intense and vivid dreams.

And when these dreams become negative, they become nightmares.

They become really intense and disruptive.

Well, we do think that bad dreams in general are still healthy and functional and maybe adaptive in some way, that they're helping us to process stressful experiences from life.

And even occasional nightmares are not necessarily a cause for alarm, but it's really when they become too frequent and

They develop into what's called nightmare disorder, where you're having nightmares maybe on a weekly basis, and it's really interrupting your sleep, and it's causing a lot of waking distress.

It develops into this pathology, which really deserves treatment, because otherwise it can just lead to increasing mental health symptoms.

Yeah, the main treatment for nightmares is called imagery rehearsal therapy.

And the basic techniques, I think, can be followed by most people even at home, rather than avoiding them or suppressing them, which is a pretty typical response to nightmares, writing them down.

And then the main technique is called re-scripting.

And this is where you actually rewrite the nightmare into a different version, maybe a more positive dream.

So you change something about the nightmare.

And this is also based on the fact that nightmares are often very recurring and repetitive.

So during re-scripting, you try to just change the content of the nightmare in some way to make it feel more positive or more satisfying.

And then you rehearse this new form of the dream.

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