How much do you think about the way your dreams impact your health?
Chances are, not much. For many years, says Dr. Westley Youngren, a sleep researcher and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the study of dreams was thought to be pseudoscience.
But today, dream engineering is considered a powerful scientific breakthrough, and sleep scientists like Youngren are researching ways to use dreaming to treat nightmares related to trauma and PTSD, a common predictor of suicide.
No one knows exactly why dreaming happens, but leading theories link it to emotional and memory processing. Everyone dreams — even if they don’t remember when they wake up.
Youngren’s research aims to manipulate dreams through targeted dream incubation, or asking people to think about something specific as they’re falling asleep.
“Whatever we think about prior to falling asleep really impacts what we go on to dream about,” Youngren told KCUR’s Up To Date.
Youngren says his research could help develop treatments for PTSD by using targeted dream incubation to re-script details of recurring nightmares, giving patients control over their dreams.
“The idea is that the new nightmare will take the place of the recurring one,” he said. “And a lot of times when you work with individuals with this therapy, they don't have the restricted nightmare — all the nightmares tend to disappear.”
- Westley Youngren, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
