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Maybe you’re inside your house, or walking through the park down the street. The scene around you is vividly real, yet altered in ways that are making you feel uneasy. Family and friends appear, but conversations produce a sense of anxiety or even dread. Disturbing emotions begin to build into fear, and then terror. You’re being chased. You’re trapped. You’re falling. Your life is in grave danger—then you’re suddenly jolted awake.

Emerging from nightmares, sweaty and with a pounding heart, provides at least a momentary sense of relief. It wasn’t real.

But the lasting effects of regular nightmares are very real. Nightmare disorder, a condition in which disturbing dreams are frequent and significantly impact life by producing fatigue or lasting feelings of unease and anxiety, is a surprisingly common ailment. In the United States, around 4 percent of adults—more than 10 million people—are affected. For those with nightmare disorder, lying down for a good night’s sleep can be an ordeal. They know that after they close their eyes, their brains will likely be flooded with negative emotions, and they’ll revisit a dreamworld they’d much rather avoid.

Now, a study published this week in Current Biology suggests an intriguing method that might help sleepers take more control of their dreams. Sounds played during sleep may reduce the frequency of nightmares and promote positive emotions that can help lead to a better slumber.

Existing therapies coach sleepers to imagine and rehearse alternate happy endings to their nightmares before bed, a practice known to significantly reduce bad dreams. Now, Swiss scientists aim to supercharge this idea by associating those happy endings with an audio cue that will trigger them during sleep. When nightmare disorder sufferers listened to a piano chord while they practiced imagining a good dream, then heard that same chord while they were in REM sleep, bad dreams were frequently kept at bay.

“We observed a spectacular clinical improvement, with a fast decrease of nightmares, together with dreams becoming emotionally more positive,” says Sophie Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva and co-author of the study. The decrease in nightmare frequency also showed staying power, lasting for at least three months after the audio experiment ended.

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Roughly 4 percent of adults in the United States have chronic nightmares. janiecbros via Getty Images

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