The one musical chord that can stop nightmares, according to science
Everyone has their own classic recurring nightmare. Some imagine all their teeth falling out, while others keep getting chased by monsters and ghouls. For some reason, mine always revolves around falling off a cliff. Is there a way that science could keep them at bay?
Of course, when you were a child going through a nightmare, the natural solution was for one of your parents to come in and sing you a lullaby to send you back off into the land of nod. Naturally, when you’re 30 and living in a house of your own, that option is probably somewhat limited to you now – not to mention possibly being even more creepy than the original nightmare to begin with. But if you really need something to soothe you back, science might just hold the answer.
Before anyone starts running a mile: no, it’s not to start putting on a playlist of lullabies as you head to bed. That would just be taking things a step too far. But as it turns out, the key to achieving a night of blissful sleep is genuinely in the music – just not in the way you might initially think. Indeed, if you do suffer from nightmares and also happen to have a piano at hand, this might pique your interest.
Scientists in Switzerland have carried out a study to discover that for people prone to suffering from nightmares while they sleep, an exercise as simple as listening to a single piano chord could potentially be enough to retrain their entire brain. The patients in the trial went through a process of therapy to come up with alternate happy endings to their most vivid nightmares, and while doing so, a major piano chord would be played to them. Sounds bizarre, right?
But what the results actually found was that when the patients were asleep and their nightmares began, this would trigger their brains to play the note and thus rewire it towards the happy ending they had pre-planned. The critical aspect is that the patients needed to be in the REM phase of sleep – and no, that doesn’t mean sticking on a bit of ‘Losing My Religion’, it’s an actual scientific thing. But the point was that the subjects of the study not only experienced fewer nightmares, but also a stream of more positive dreams as a result.
Some might think that having a single piano note played to you over and over again might be the stuff of nightmares in itself. But if you are plagued by that pounding feeling in your chest when you try to get off to sleep, surely anything is bound to be worth a try. Of course, science doesn’t always hold every single one of the answers, but this seems like a simple thing to give a shot.
It would be interesting to see if, as the science advances, there could be more and more sonic options to keep the terror at bay. Perhaps a bit of classical strings, or a sweet folkish harmony might also do the trick. What may be less likely is the possibility of rock and roll coming into the fray – could anyone imagine a bit of Black Sabbath managing to bring their nightmares under control? If anything, that would only make them worse.
