What to Do If You Constantly Have Nightmares
A single nightmare is scary enough, but if you keep having nightmares—maybe even the same one over and over again—you may be afraid to fall asleep. Luckily, there are ways to deal with nightmares, and there’s even a term for what you can go through: nighttime disorder.
What is nightmare disorder?
We all have bad dreams, but a nightmare is something more intense. You’re not just stressed out about having to take a final exam you didn’t prepare for, you’re fighting for your life in a scenario that feels vivid and real. You may wake up sweaty and with a racing heart, recall disturbing details clearly, and have difficulty getting back to sleep.
It’s worth seeing a mental health professional if nightmares are interfering with your daytime functioning or preventing you from getting enough sleep. For people with nocturnal disorder, nightmares can occur frequently and cause intense anxiety or fear.
Nightmare disorder often occurs as part of another mental health problem, which makes seeking help even more important as the problem can be more serious than just nightmares. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often associated with recurring nightmares, but other conditions such as anxiety and depression can also occur with nightmares.
How Rewriting Your Nightmares Can Help
While therapy and medication can help, one of the most supported treatments for recurring nightmares is known as rehearsal imaging therapy, or IRT. (In case you’re wondering, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has a position paper on what treatments they recommend; imagery rehearsal therapy is at the top of the list.)
In IRT, you are essentially rewriting your nightmare to control the ending. If you have an injury related to a nightmare item, it is best to do so under the guidance of a professional.
The four steps of therapy, according to this guide for patients and physicians , are:
- As soon as you wake up from the nightmare, make some notes to yourself about what happened in the dream. To allow yourself to fall asleep again afterwards, the guide advises against typing it on your phone; Take notes on paper with a book torch or record voice notes.
- Record the dream later as a story, but change the ending . It’s up to you how to do it: it can be realistic, or you can get superpowers, depending on what makes sense to you. The whole idea is that you pick yourself up again .
- Review your script before you go to bed. Tell yourself that if you have this dream again, it will have the end you hoped for.
- Once you have a dream—regardless of whether the rewrite worked or not—review the process and either celebrate your success or repeat the dream rewrite process.
IRT is considered a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. While you can try doing it yourself for milder cases of recurring nightmares, it may be helpful to do it under the guidance of a professional. RRI alone may not be the only treatment you need, so be open to discussing other therapies and possibly medications if that is what you need.