How To Hack Your Nightmares And Engineer Your Dreams

There’s a nightmare I have that exists in my head almost as long as my earliest memories. My family and I are on our annual camping trip in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. We are hiking and we get separated, leaving me with my dad and my older sister with my mom. As we are trying to find our way back to my mom and sister, my dad and I get chased by Smokey Bear. Yes, the friendly cartoon bear who teaches people about forest fires. (Only YOU can prevent wildfires. That one.) Unfortunately, I’ll never know whether my dad and I escaped from Smokey’s unprecedented pursuit of innocent lost hikers because I always seemed to wake up smack in the middle of the chase scene.

I’ve tried to analyze it over the years (Fear of abandonment? No bear is actually friendly? My dad is arguably the worst hiker in the family and I am the youngest?) but the dream seemed more and more ridiculous the older I got. Over time, it got replaced with more common dreams like falling, sleeping through my alarm when I was supposed to be running the New York City Marathon, or retroactively failing out of college a decade after I earned my bachelor’s degree. The usual stuff.

There’s something about dreams that hold a firm grip on us. They are deeply personal yet astoundingly universal, constructs of our own minds that still utterly surprise us with their nonsensical plot lines. While dreaming, we accept impossible events without question, yet somehow, when we wake up, we remain firm that every dream must mean something about our current selves, or our past or future ones.

But could they, maybe? Historically, dream research has long been thought of as pseudoscience, delegated to the likes of fortune-tellers and Freudian psychology. But over the past several decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to untangle the intricate role that dreaming plays in our health, chipping away at the connection between these nighttime fantasies and learning and memory. Now, a group of psychologists are zeroing in on nightmares, a distinct type of dream that has haunted many a child and adult alike. Early research suggests these types of dreams seem to be associated with mental health conditions, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, and an uptick in nightmares may even help predict suicidal ideation.

But getting there hasn’t been easy. Researchers have had to do the hard work of defining what a dream is, what a nightmare is, and when our dreams actually signal something is off — and when they could be simply a misinterpretation of a friendly forest-fighting bear.

Westley Youngren is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri – Kansas City where he’s focused his work on the intersection of nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder. Right now is a really excellent time to be a dream scientist, Youngren tells me. He sat down with Inverse to discuss dreams, nightmares, mental health, and why lucid dreaming is overhyped.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start with a simple question: What exactly is a dream?

The way scientists think of dreams now is any type of event that happens while asleep that is typically remembered upon awakening. This could be something like, ‘I woke up in the morning and I had this feeling of being chased.’ Usually there’s a visual element, but it’s not necessary.

But of course, it's more complicated than that. For example, you can dream and not remember it. If we were to watch someone on a polysomnography, which is the way we record sleep, we would be able to see a dream that someone might not remember. But short of that, the only way we can quantify a dream is if someone remembers it.

How often do we dream?

Scientists used to think that the only time that dreams could occur was during REM sleep, but that's been proven to not be true. We now know that we dream throughout the night (even if we don’t remember them all). How many dreams per night is kind of hard to know because we’d need to wake people up to get that actual report of the dream.

“Nightmares are rarely helpful and can, in many cases, be actively harmful.”

How long do they last? Sometimes if I dream during a 20-minute nap, it can feel like the adventure went for hours.

They can definitely range. They can be two minutes, or much longer than that. But they can also seem much longer, too. And the way they do that is kind of in the same way that movies do it. In a movie, you're not seeing a character go to the bathroom or brush their hair. They cut to the good parts. Dreams do that, too. So a dream could go on for several days, but during those days only a couple of events have actually happened.

How did you personally get interested in sleep science?

I was in the Marines prior to my undergraduate studies. When I used to be up at all hours of the night, I used to think, I just want a job where I can sleep all day! It became a running joke for me. But when I got to the University of Tulsa to start my bachelor’s degree, there just so happened to be some psychology research going on that focused on nightmares. It was the perfect lucky fit.

What is a nightmare?

A nightmare is a very distinct kind of dream. Technically, it is defined as a bad dream that wakes you up and is remembered upon awakening. So it has to wake you up. And it has to wake you up due to either being, like, really scary or some other strong emotion, like disgusting.

There has to be some strong emotion that wakes you up, and then you have to be able to remember it, of course. The type of dream people often confuse with nightmares are what we call stress dreams. That’s something like, you have a big presentation coming up and the night before, you dream that you forgot your laptop at home. It is really stressful, but it didn’t wake you up. We’d call that a stress dream.

Yeah, I have a lot of those. I always assumed those were nightmares. But I guess not?

Right. It kind of gets back to that question of, what are dreams for? There’s a lot of research theorizing that stress dreams are to prepare us for something. Like, if I have a big lecture and I stress about forgetting my laptop, I'll be sure to pack my laptop. So they can be somewhat helpful.

Nightmares, on the other hand, are rarely helpful and can, in many cases, be actively harmful.

A healthy person has a nightmare on average only a couple times a year. We call these idiopathic nightmares. They are just random occurrences, usually, where they wake a person up. They’re kind of aroused; their heart is racing. They think, ‘Oh, that was really stressful.’ But they usually go back to sleep pretty quickly.

New research suggests that nightmares are more predictive of death by suicide than PTSD, depression, insomnia, and anxiety.

But when nightmares start happening repeatedly, like multiple times a week, and a person can’t go back to sleep after the nightmare, that’s when they are a signal that something else could be wrong. For example, new research done over the last several years suggests that nightmares are predictive of death by suicide above all other things. They are more predictive than PTSD, depression, insomnia, and anxiety.

Additionally, the connection between PTSD and repeated, regular nightmares is also fairly well established at this point. Trauma-related nightmares, as we call them, are when a person has a nightmare that is usually connected to the trauma that they experienced. And they can be a vicious cycle. For example, someone could wake up and be like, I was just sexually assaulted again in my dreams. I'm not going back to sleep. I don't want that to happen again. And so then they stay awake the rest of the night, which then makes the rest of their symptoms even worse, which then makes it more likely to have a nightmare the following night.

And that’s where my work starts. Finding new and innovative ways to combat nightmares.

How do you do that?

By having the person literally rewrite their nightmares.

How does that work?

The concept is called targeted dream incubation. We use cues at the onset of sleep to direct a person’s dreams toward a specific goal. My research right now is working to show that this concept, targeted dream incubation, is possible; that you can, in fact, direct the course of your dream before you go to sleep.

Here’s how it works: We bring people into the lab during the middle of the day and we let them fall asleep. Just before they drift off, we say something like, ‘Hey, Claire, I want you to try to think of a tree while you fall asleep.’ And you're like, ‘Yes, got it.’ When we notice you falling asleep, we say, ‘All right, Claire, remember to think of a tree.’ Then, when we notice you start to dream, we wake you up and we say, ‘Hey, Claire, what was going through your mind?’ You give us a report. We say, ‘OK, go back to sleep, and remember to try to think of a tree.’

We do this repeatedly for about 90 minutes. And what happens is people end up dreaming about trees! When I did it, I dreamt that I was in the Keebler elf tree. It was wild. And then when my lab mate did it, she was lost in the woods.

“We explain it like a movie, and say, ‘OK, we want you to change the script of the movie’ ... and the idea is that that new nightmare will replace the old one.”

More importantly, though, it shows that we do have the ability to influence our dream content. The next step is to add it to ongoing treatments. If we go back to the example of nightmares associated with PTSD, an example could be a person repeatedly dreaming that they are back in Iraq and their convoy gets ambushed and their friend dies. So the rescript would be, I'm back in Iraq, I'm in my convoy. We get attacked, but I rescue my friend. We explain it like a movie, and say, ‘OK, we want you to change the script of the movie.’ So they write it down and then every night, before going to bed, they read this new nightmare, and the idea is that that new nightmare will replace the old one, and then it will help process it as well.

Is that the same thing as lucid dreaming? Or is it the first step to lucid dreaming?

Lucid dreaming is related, but not the same thing. In a lucid dream, you’re aware that you are dreaming. This is more like you go to bed with a goal and then that goal is influencing your dreams.

But lucid dreaming is just so hard. There have been so many people that have tried to get people to lucid dream, and you end up spending a lot of resources and often come up short. And we don’t really know why other than it's just a really hard skill to learn.

What is the moonshot, future goal of this research? Do you think that dreams can become a diagnostic tool for psychologists or psychiatrists? Will we be able to predict mental health disorders from dreams?

I think it's more of a piece of a puzzle than the puzzle itself. A psychologist or doctor could ask someone: How have you been sleeping and dreaming? If they say, ‘I don’t remember my dreams,’ then that could mean they actually aren’t getting good sleep for whatever reason. If they say they constantly have stress dreams, that could reflect to us anxiety, but we'd still probably need to probe deeper.

So is dreaming healthy?

I think so! Having nightmares occasionally (again, a few times a year) could actually mean that you're getting healthy amounts of sleep. We dream throughout the night during all the stages of sleep. However, our most vivid dreams happen during REM sleep. And we know that the more sleep we get, the more REM sleep we get.

If someone says that they always have really vivid dreams and even have nightmares a couple times a year, to me, that might mean that they're actually getting a lot of sleep, which could be good, whereas if someone says they never remember their dreams, that could actually mean they aren’t getting good sleep.

Have you used any of these methods on yourself? Like targeted dream incubation? Or are you a lucid dreamer?

I have lucid dreams from time to time. But I don’t really try to. It’s just honestly too hard. I do enjoy it when it happens though. I try to journal my dreams as much as possible; mostly because I think it's really fun and interesting. I always tell people when they say they don't remember their dreams is to, as soon as you wake up in the morning, write down whatever you remember, even if it's just a feeling or an emotion. If you do that every day for a week, at the end of the week, you'll likely be able to fill up a page with all your dreams. Remembering our dreams really is like a muscle, and the more we work on it, the better we get.

The last thing I do is… and again I love spooky stuff… I like to end most of my nights reading a spooky book. I just love reading horror. And then a lot of times that bleeds into my dreams, which allows me to have some kind of weird and wild dreams. And I find that to be really fun.

“Whatever you're thinking about prior to falling asleep is really going to influence what you dream about.”

Wow. I think I do the opposite. I try not to watch scary stuff before bed!

Yeah, one of the biggest things we know about, like, what influences dream content is what’s called the continuity hypothesis. And really it's like, whatever you're thinking about prior to falling asleep is really going to influence what you dream about.

Okay, so should we all be using targeted dream incubation?

This is a really good question. It gets at another aspect of our research. Dreams can be fun and exciting. Like thinking of your Smokey Bear dream, it's probably fun to tell people that story, you know, and telling people about your dreams is a fun experience. We're also starting to look at how joy relates to dreaming and can that improve the quality of people's lives?

Right now, the data is kind of backwards. If I took out some of my data and looked at people who remember their dreams, what we would find is that people who remember their dreams have higher rates of anxiety and depression and PTSD, but that's just because the people who tend to remember their dreams are the people that tend to have bad dreams.

But the idea is, if we took healthy people and we had them remember their dreams more frequently, would that improve the quality of their life, or would that bring them some level of joy?