Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Dean Regas here, astronomer and host of Looking Up. I journey to the far reaches of the universe, hearing from scientists, astronauts, and geeky celebs along the way. We cover everything from black holes to the latest in science fiction. Listen now to the Looking Up podcast from the NPR Network and Cincinnati Public Radio.
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. You come home from work. You're exhausted. You finally get into bed, and your head hits the pillow. And then the next thing you know, your car is barely out of control on the highway. You're going around that turn. But you're in the back seat. You can't reach the brakes. At least, that's my reoccurring nightmare.
But when I told that to Michelle Carr, she wasn't phased.
That is a very common dream theme. I have it all the time as well. I think it's just related to our physical body not really receiving any sensation of the car pedal. So the dream is going out of control.
As a sleep scientist at the University of Montreal, her job is basically watching people sleep. So when it comes to dreams and nightmares, she's pretty much heard it all.
Teeth falling out or flying or falling or finding new rooms in my house.
Michelle is the author of the new book called Nightmare Obscura. In it, she explores the science of dreams, nightmares, even something called dream engineering, where people are able to influence their own dreams while they sleep. But why we dream or get nightmares is still a bit mysterious for scientists.
We know so much about how important sleep is for our health, but we're only just beginning to uncover whether dreaming and the way that we feel during sleep is significant in our health as well.
And since humans spend somewhere around one-third of our lives asleep, we had to know more. So today on the show, why your nightmares go bump in the night. We dive into the science of our sleeping life with Michelle Carr and make nightmares a little more known, a little less scary. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 2: What common nightmares do people experience?
Our dreams are really short and brief and maybe thought-like when we're in stage three sleep, or we don't remember anything at all. And then the fourth stage is REM sleep. It's called REM because our eyes are moving, rapid eye movements. And our body and our mind are actually quite active during REM. Our brain is even, it looks very similar to wakefulness.
We have a lot of really high frequency activity in the brain. And REM sleep is the stage when we also have the most vivid and emotional and sensory dream experiences.
It seems like, at least for me and many people, like there's an emotional component to sleep. And in your book, Nightmare Obscura, you write about a study you love where participants watched embarrassing videos of themselves singing and then their brain showed signs of shame. But that changed after a night of sleep. What does that tell you about like the importance of sleep?
Yeah, I think this is maybe something that a lot of people can relate to, that we all go through different stressful experiences during the day. And at night, just before sleep, you might be worrying about an argument you had or really stressed about something that happened during the day. And then after a night of sleep, if you think about that same problem, it seems completely manageable.
And this is one of the functions of sleep. It's helping us to essentially... In a way, let go of a lot of the distress that we accrue during the day, like all of the emotions that get activated during the day. We kind of are able to let go of them during a night of sleep. And even for memories that we have, we let go of the emotion that's attached to them.
So it helps us to adapt and to be better able to manage anything that might come up the next day.
It kind of sounds like exposure therapy.
Yeah, I think that there is a similarity there in that you're... But I think one of the keys about sleep and what makes it different from maybe like being exposed to stressors in waking life is that there's actually a very physiological component that
The brain and the body are in a specific state where during sleep we're able to reactivate emotional memories, like the amygdala is active, but our physical body is actually subdued in certain ways. So we think that's really essential to being able to strengthen and to hold on to and to store important memories, but to let go of the kind of stress and arousal that's attached to them.
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Chapter 3: How does sleep affect our emotional well-being?
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.
And speaking of stress when you're awake, you mentioned in your book that there's a point where nightmares can become harmful to overall health. So what are some methods researchers use to treat nightmares?
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. Because nightmares very often have very recurring themes.
So if somebody has a nightmare of a tidal wave or a nightmare of being chased, they tend to have these themes that recur over time. And it's almost like this script that's learned in your mental imagery.
And so imagery rehearsal therapy works with first just a little bit of exposure to the nightmare, like kind of being more comfortable with looking at your nightmares, talking about them, writing them down and not being so aversive to them. And then changing the nightmare in some way. So you write a slightly new script or change something so it's not so scary or make yourself more powerful.
And it's a dream, so you can do whatever you want, really. And then before sleep, you visualize this new, more pleasant or more satisfying dream. Visualize that for 10 to 20 minutes before sleep each night. And over time, this...
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