Lucid dreaming gives dreamers a sense of self-awareness and control over their dreams. For people with PTSD who suffer from nightmares, lucid dreaming could be a promising treatment. Although philosophers and scientists have written about dreams for centuries, science is only just beginning to understand how dreams work in the brain. Lucid dreaming (LD), in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming and is able to manipulate the dream, is even less well understood. “Often during a LD, you can control dream events voluntarily, for example flying, or you can gain access to waking cognitive abilities that are not normally available, such as remembering events from the previous day,” explained Tore Nielsen, the director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at Montreal’s Sacre-Coeur (Sacred Heart) Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, in an interview with Healthline. “In regular dreaming, you are not aware that you are dreaming, you are not usually in voluntary control of dream events, and you don’t usually have access to all your waking cognitive abilities.” Learn More About Sleep: Healthy Sleep 101 »

A New Battleground: Dreams This dream control might be able to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) overcome nightmares. These can be frightening and overwhelming for anyone, but for people with PTSD, nightmares can be a way of reliving the events that first traumatized them. Every dream seems dangerous, and sleep becomes an ordeal rather than a refuge. “Nightmares are terrifying experiences because during regular nightmares (like regular dreams) we are unable to produce a rational judgment about its bizarreness, thus we strongly believe that what is happening during the nightmare is real,” said Dr. Sérgio Mota-Rolim, Ph.D., of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, told Healthline. Mota-Rolim hopes that lucid dreaming might be able to help. He explained, “Psychotherapies based on inducing LD could be an effective way of treating recurrent nightmares of PTSD patients, because they—being lucid during the nightmare—would be able to: one, naturally lose their fear by realizing the absence of real threats, i.e. the lack of reality of the perceptual experience; two, simply try to wake up during the nightmare; and, three, change dream context, in a way of transforming the nightmare into a neutral or even a pleasant dream.” There’s evidence to support this idea. One set of case studies showed that people with recurring nightmares saw their bad dreams go away after they learned lucid dreaming. Another study co-authored by Victor Spoormaker, Ph.D., found that lucid dreaming reduced the frequency and intensity of nightmares, but didn’t do anything to treat the sleep disturbance, anxiety, and depression that often accompany PTSD. “We found that LD was effective in reducing nightmare frequency, but there are a few ‘but’s in there,” said Spoormaker, a staff scientist at Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, in an interview with Healthline. “One is that not everyone could learn. It is a complex treatment, one for which there are easier treatments available.” Spoormaker recommends an alternative treatment for nightmares. “Imagery rehearsal therapy is a treatment in which the people with nightmares write down their nightmares and at some point, they will write a new ending, make a change in the nightmare itself,” he said. “Then they will rehearse this new nightmare. By imagining the new nightmare, the nightmare has a lower frequency afterwards. There’s some promising research in several PTSD populations. It is much more effective in the data than lucid dreaming treatment.” Read More: What Causes Nightmares? »