Therapy by repetition of mental imagery is increasingly practiced in France, making it possible to rewrite nightmares that recur too often.
Being eaten by a shark, being suffocated with no way out… These nightmares, when they come back regularly with violent or near-death scenes, can become problematic.
6% of French adults are affected by the disease of nightmares, that is to say that they see these bad dreams become recurrent and they “alter the quality of life”, specifies on BFMTV Agnès Brion, psychiatrist and specialist in sleeping troubles. They can lead to anxiety, insomnia and even depression.
A technique used since November 13
To overcome this, therapy by repetition of mental imagery has been proposed for several years by doctors. This technique, implemented in the 90s in the United States, began to be practiced in France, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, following the attacks of November 13, 2015.
“What we are proposing is to make a mental imagery of these nightmares”, explains Marc Rey, president of the Institute of Sleep and Vigilance.
A patient is made to write down his nightmare in the morning or when he wakes up in the middle of the night, then he “reads the nightmare again at night and changes a number of aspects to create another story”.
This technique is based on the principle that “we incorporate into our sleep the events of our life (…) and the learning we do”, continues Agnès Brion. The repetition of mental imagery makes it possible to “learn beautiful dreams” then to repeat them by appealing to “all the sensory aspects”.
According to Agnès Brion, the positive consequences can be perceived “in a few weeks”. But the therapy, “like all therapies”, does not work for everyone, warns the psychiatrist. “It’s considered to be more effective than drugs targeting nightmares,” she adds.
While they can become problematic when they recur, nightmares usually serve to “digest” negative emotional memories.
