Sorry to you as well. A brutal nightmare is dispiriting indeed. I totally agree, I hope there is an effective, low-risk, pharmaceutical + therapy combo that can knock out the worst of these things. 

I think it would be interesting to see statistics on this. Some examples could be: What frequency of people suffer from nightmares? How do they rate it on an intensity scale? What's the proportion for whom nightmares affect their everyday living? Are there DALYs associated with nightmares (probably such data won't be available, but it could be interesting to explore)?

The data might come from either current studies or from future ones that you/others might want to conduct.

Wow, I thought I kept up on everything ACT related so I can't believe I missed this! Thanks for sharing. There's super interesting stuff in there. I'm glad he also mentions image rehearsal therapy so that I don't feel way off base mentioning it in my post. I need to read more about the pharmaceutical treatment (prazosin) he mentions as being the standard of care. 

Honestly, I'm glad I never read the article because it probably would have dissuaded me from posting here. I would have thought, "Well what's the point of writing about something Scott already covered." But that's not the right attitude! We need a multitude of voices pushing things forward, even if some voices are far less talented at writing than others :) 

Thanks for sharing. I'm so glad you were able to find relief. I'll have to take a closer look at EMDR. 

I started reading The Body Keeps the Score a couple years ago but set it aside because the writing style grated on me. Maybe I should give it another go. 

I really enjoyed the Schwitzgebel post, thanks. When he says "We don't really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep" it reminded me of the TV show Severance. 

In the show (minor spoilers) a group of people get a procedure so that their working self has no memory of their self when they are not at work, and vice versa. The selves that work are treated almost like slaves by the selves don't work, even though it's technically the same person. 

It's weird to imagine that there is one version of me that routinely goes through torturous experiences. Meanwhile, the awake version of me is mostly just like, "Meh, whatever, dream Drew has been bitten by poisonous snakes before, one more time won't hurt him." 

For what it's worth, I think Schwitzgebel's premise makes more sense in the case of good dreams than bad dreams. In particular, it is intuitive to many people that positive fulfillment requires not just positive feelings, but also the appropriate grounding for these feelings - i.e. if your child died and someone gives you a shot that causes you to be thrilled about it, intuitively this is not good for you. On the other hand negative experiences don't seem to have this same requirement, if your child is alive, and someone gives you a shot that makes you miserable about this, that is still bad for you even if it is not properly grounded in this same way.

In the case of dreams you could imagine a more direct connection, for instance if you improve your "dream life" that might mean giving yourself a sense of accomplishment you re-evaluate the overall quality of your life through, a sense of how well your life is going that is actually hollow and will either be forgotten, or cause regret on waking. Personally I'm not compelled by this very much either and think it actually would be a good thing to enhance one's dreams to be even more positive, but if this is ultimately what is behind Schwitzgebel's intuition, then it doesn't undermine the case for reducing nightmares. I think it is actually pretty hard to come up with a compelling theory of value that would rule out the value of reducing nightmares.

For my own part I can't relate very much because I rarely have nightmares and usually wake up from those I do have quickly, but I'm very sorry to hear the author does, and I can imagine this issue has gotten ignored for mostly very poor reasons. I'm excited to see more work done on it.

I'd be interested to here your views beyond suffering/pleasure on how the cognitive benefits could fit in here given that these could translate into useful abilities in waking life:

• normal dreams are important for processing of experiences, memories, etc.
• some evidence that lucid dreaming can improve motor performance in real life (not sure how robust)
• likewise I'd expect there to be creative utility to influence a world without physical limitations (not dissimilar to video games)

What makes you skeptical of the intervention?

Thanks, yeah, I think starting with the simples possible thing is usually a good idea. 

Unfortunately, I could not build the app myself nor could I supervise a bright high schooler building it. But I am brimming with enthusiasm and would love to help out in other ways if I could! 

I just got a forum DM from an EA-aligned mental health charity saying they might be able to recruit volunteers to build some digital tools to help in this space. I look forward to having a call with them and seeing how I can contribute. 

I've worked in tech basically my whole career but it's always been on the growth/sales/marketing side of things. 

Oh and thanks for calling out my mistake on imagery reversal / imagery rehearsal, that is now fixed that in the post. 




 

That's a good point, thanks 

I liked that post a lot, thanks for sharing. I wholeheartedly agree with your first footnote — "The moral importance of time-dilation turns out to be an absolutely fascinating question"

It's something I want to learn more about. 

I liked that a lot, thanks for the share. This reminds me that I wanted to note that I also have incredibly positive dreams as well. I have higher dream highs, I am pretty sure, than most of my friends. This is especially true if I am able to lucid dream. 

There are so many interesting things to note in that post and in Gwern's comment. 

There's one part of Gwern's post I'd like to pull over here because I think it adds to the conversation around how bad nightmares are (or aren't.)

 I agree with Harri's observation that some dreams can feel like they are lasting an incredibly long time. And if it's a bad dream that's obviously really bad. 

Gwern brushes that concern aside by saying:

 "You can't remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to [the dream], and when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate."

It doesn't seem relevant to me that the awake person is processing time normally. I care about the subjective experience of whatever person is suffering. And if someone has an awful experience that feels like it lasts hours or even days, I think that's worse than a subjectively shorter bad experience. This kind of stuff happens with psychedelics, too. 

The Astral Codex Ten post linked above covers this - for some people, nightmares and blood pressure seem to be connected, and prazosin (a blood pressure medication) can reduce nightmares. The problem being that sometimes it lowers blood pressure too much and makes people dizzy.

Ha, that's great, points for a novel earning to give strategy. Some of the stuff that happens to Dream Drew would not be out of place in  a Rob Zombie film or the Saw franchise, so I see where you're coming from. 

When watching shows or movies now I usually look away from anything even a little gory out of fear that the images will find a way into my dreams.