Forthwith proffering summary info on some neat dream research..... I read a while back that at the University of Montreal's Dream and Nightmare Lab, a fellow named Dr. Tony Zadra used a procdure for helping patients who were having recurrent nightmares. He had patients go back into their nightmares while they were awake. They did this with guided imagery. At the peak moment of dread in the nightmare, a patient was instructed to do something like a "stop action" bit to begin instead to imagine an irrelevant and minimally interesting task such as looking at one's hands. (This reminds of an EMDR attention-distraction procdure in that both EMDR and Zadra's nightmare treatment require attention to an irrelevant task at peak moments in some highly disagreeable scenario. The distraction in both cases apparently serves as a means to "unlock" an otherwise tenacious grip of some bad-feeling feeling on one's consciousness. These distraction tasks make me think of lock picks or Super Glue removers.) After the distraction task, patients would imagine completing the dream with a more successful outcome so that it was no longer in the category "nightmare." Patients would continue to rehearse the new ending while awake and later went to bed as usual. The result of Zadra's method was that some patients either dreamed more or less the new dream they invented when awake, but others actually remembered to look at their hands at the critical moment in their dream and then consciously created a more favorable dream outcome. In either case, patients were relieved of the nightmares. I know of this work only from secondary sources and have not read an original report of it. So what I have just writien is all I know about Zeda and his work. ................................ "Think like a man of action; act like a man of thought." Henri Bergson
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