Michelle Carr

your sleep is interrupted and you wake up in a state of distress.

I mean, I think there's a benefit to bad dreams in general and even to occasional nightmares.

And I think...

If nightmares are occurring occasionally or if you're having bad dreams, I think these are all reflecting what is an adaptive process of sleep and of dreaming, which is you're trying to work through these stressful or negative experiences that you've had.

Yeah, there's actually not too many actual recordings of people having nightmares in the sleep lab.

This is one of the kind of curious things about studying nightmares or any sleep disorder, actually, that patients who have nightmares or other sleep disorders...

frequently at home, they very rarely have episodes in the lab.

I know.

I mean, that's one of the theories.

But in general, we have some evidence that experiencing emotion or memories and dreams, it seems like it's the areas of the brain that are active

in waking life, but there is some work on kind of the brain basis of nightmares and nightmare disorder.

And one thing that we have seen is that people who have nightmares

potentially have a difference in how their brain regulates emotion.

And specifically, we know that sleep is important for emotion regulation and it specifically helps this connection between basically frontal or prefrontal areas of the brain, which are responsible for helping us to control and to regulate our emotion, and their connection with the amygdala, with our emotional arousal centers.

In people who have nightmares, what we see is that there's actually less activation in their frontal areas of their brain when they are experiencing emotional distress.

So in principle, we think this means they're less able to regulate and to control and to manage their emotion, and that this is occurring both during REM sleep, when emotion regulation is really maintained,

And then this spills over into wakefulness as well, making them, they'll have a harder time managing and dealing with stress and waking life because of this.

The main methods to treat nightmares are imagery rehearsal therapy is the most common therapy, and there's just a lot of other variations of that.

And it's basically a technique...

what's called re-scripting a nightmare's content.