Maybe you’re running from a killer, or you’re lost in your old high school on your way to the final exam. Maybe your teeth are crumbling and falling out, or your car is spinning out of control. But whatever form your bad dreams take, they’re almost certainly part of your life, and an unwelcome part at that.
“I’ve always been personally very interested in dreams, and I had a lot of nightmares growing up,” says neuroscientist Michelle Carr. But unlike most people who have bad dreams, Carr delves into the science of why nightmares happen and how to prevent them. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and co-leader of the Laboratoire des Rêves et des Cauchemars, or the “Dream and Nightmare Laboratory.”
Nightmares have been around for longer than there have been people to experience them. Distantly-related animals like octopuses, rats, zebrafish, and zebra finches, separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, experience some type of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the phase in which dreams are likelier to occur. What’s more, these animals make sounds and movements that hint that any dreams they’re having aren’t pleasant. Some scientists postulate that common ancestors of these animals first evolved the ability to dream more than 300 million years ago. And with dreams, come nightmares.
One of the earliest written records describing a bad dream was from Egypt, 4,000 years ago: a letter written by a man named Heni to his late father, asking him for protection from nightmares of a deceased servant staring at him. In the thousands of years since, people from cultures around the world have attempted to explain bad dreams and find ways to avoid them.
However, modern-day research centers devoted to studying nightmares, or dreams in general, are rare. The Dream and Nightmare Laboratory, founded in 1991, is one of the few in the world specifically dedicated to the subject. “We dream scientists think that dreams are so interesting and fascinating and important that we do ask ourselves, ‘Why isn’t more attention put onto them?’” says Claudia Picard-Deland, a postdoctoral researcher at the lab.
The laboratory is situated in Montréal’s Sacré-Coeur Hospital. The hospital’s central building is nearly 100 years old and looks like an old Catholic church, complete with round stained glass rose windows and an ornate cross atop a central tower. But the Dream and Nightmare Lab is unassuming: several small bedrooms for research subjects and a “control room” for the scientists. The researchers outfit the volunteers with tiny electrodes stuck to their scalps and faces and bid them goodnight. Then, from the control room, they watch screens that chart electrical impulses of the subjects’ brains and eye movements.
“We watch their brain waves, and there’s also a video recording of the participant that we watch through the night,” says Carr. From brain waves and video alone, the scientists can’t tell whether a dream is occurring, let alone whether it’s a bad one. But there are clues: spikes in brain activity, movement of the limbs, changes in breathing. To supplement the data about what’s physically happening in a dreamer’s body, the researchers interview their subjects about any dreams they had in the lab.
Carr recalls one study she worked on, in which the researchers were creating a baseline comparison between people who suffer vivid nightmares and folks with less problematic sleep. The scientists found that even when not actually having a terrible dream, nightmare sufferers’ dreams were unusual. “We found that people who have more nightmares actually have more vivid dreams overall. Just taking a nap in our lab, the nightmare subjects had dreams that had much more sensory experiences, more bodily sensations, more emotional content,” says Carr. “It just seemed like their dreaming altogether was more vivid. We even looked at their daydreams, and they have really vivid, bizarre, very dreamike daydreams. So they seem to just be very imaginative.”
There’s hope for people who suffer from frequent nightmares, because the vivid nature of their dreams may contain a means to solving their problem. Carr’s research focuses on dream engineering: helping people take control of their dreams. “Dream engineering is really just trying to give people more agency, so that you change your habits in dreaming,” she says.
Vivid nightmares may be linked to sleep paralysis, a condition that can occur when a person is on the brink between sleep and wakefulness. “Your body is paralyzed during REM sleep, but mentally, you wake up,” says Carr. And when the brain attempts to make sense of the situation, it projects dream-like elements into the waking world. “People very often dream that there’s some malevolent presence in the room, that something is threatening them or holding them down,” says Carr. “It only lasts like 30 seconds, but it’s 30 seconds of terror.”
The semi-conscious state of sleep paralysis may hold the key to engineering less frightening dreams, through a technique called lucid dreaming. In a lucid dream, the person realizes that they’re dreaming and can take control of their actions within the dream.
The dream engineering division of the lab is still in early stages, but its goal, says Carr, is “to develop better methods, different techniques, to interface more directly with the dreaming mind.” The researchers often use sensory stimulation, like flashing lights and beeping sounds, as a tool. These sensory stimuli “can prompt someone while they sleep, while they dream. They can trigger a memory, or it can remind them to become lucid,” Carr adds. For instance, research subjects can be taught (while they’re awake) that a flashing light means they’re dreaming. Then, when the dream engineers flicker the lights in the room where the subjects are sleeping, “it filters it into their dreams,” says Carr. “The lights start flickering, and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a bad dream. So now that I know that I’m dreaming, I can choose how to engage with the dream.’” For instance, a lucid dreamer being chased by a monster in a nightmare could decide to fight back, or to fly away.
Helping people take control of their bad dreams can make a big difference in their lives, because nightmares can affect people’s mental and even physical health. But the Dream and Nightmare Lab’s work goes beyond simply trying to stop bad dreams in their tracks: The researchers are curious about links between dreaming and other key brain functions like learning, and even the evolutionary reasons for dreaming in the first place.
“Right now in science, the main approaches are looking at how dreams relate to processing experiences and memories, and how that can be potentially useful,” says Carr. “Dreams are almost always social, over 80 percent of our dreams feature other characters. So it seems like we’re really primed to interact with other characters in our dreams.”
Even nightmares may serve an evolutionary purpose. “Dreams seem to feature threats more often than waking life, so it seems like dreams are selectively presenting threats to us,” says Carr. Nightmares, she says, may help us “practice confronting and avoiding and getting out of threatening situations.”
Of course, the evolutionary value of nightmares may be a small comfort the next time you awaken from one with a gasp of terror. But if they’re a regular problem for you, know that scientists like the dream engineers at the Dream and Nightmare Lab may have found solutions. While Carr once suffered from vivid nightmares, lucid dreaming has allowed her to avoid them for a long time. At this point, she says it’s hard for her to even remember the subjects of the bad dreams that once plagued her: “I don’t have them anymore.”
