Disrupting the nasty dream circuit

 

I've just heard about someone waking up in the morning with psychotic thoughts following some disturbing dream in the night.

    Now, I'm no doctor, so these are just my personal wild ideas, which must already have been considered and employed by the specialists.

    One path to explore might be to expose the person to pleasant things (aural or visual, e.g., soothing music or sounds of natural phenomena like wind, water and waves; paintings, Chinese calligraphy or art visuals) last thing before sleep, imbuing him with nice sounds and therefore nice dreams. Sort of re-wiring his dream feeds / paths, which might then result in pleasant dreams, and therefore pleasant thoughts upon waking, or at least no psychotic thoughts.

    I say the above having in mind what happened in my BA.4 [final] year at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies).

    The Japanese teacher (who was also the head of the Japanese Section) made us do a vocabulary test every Friday morning: 25 kanji (Chinese characters / 漢字 / Hànzì) each week, cumulative.

    Background to Japanese kanji:  each one has a minimum of two readings (a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading).  More if they’re also used as verbs, e.g., with different endings (past tense, transitive or intransitive, etc.).  So it’s 25 characters (minimum two readings) in Week.1, 50 characters (minimum two readings) in Week.2, etc.

    I asked to be excused from this test since Japanese was my Special Subject, not my major, but Prof. O’Neill said, “You can do it, you don't need to spend much time learning them, you won’t have any trouble!”

    It’d be disrespectful, after what he’d said, not to turn up, so on Thursday nights I’d learn them last thing before sleeping.

    I got full marks every Friday morning, so Prof. O’Neill said, “See?  I told you!”

    A couple of decades later, I read somewhere that when we’re asleep, the brain is then filing (/ sorting out) what we’ve experienced (/ seen, heard) during the day, starting with the latest (/ last seen or heard).  So maybe that’s why my learning the Japanese kanji last thing before sleep was so effective.

    So, I wonder if the same might help for the person waking up with psychotic thoughts after some horrible dream the night before. If my exposing my brain to kanji readings and meanings last thing before sleeping helped net me full marks for those tests the next day, then exposing the person to pleasant things last thing before his bedtime might let his brain file pleasant things during his sleep, which might then become pleasant dream memories when he wakes up, instead of psychotic thoughts. Break the nasty dream after-effect / circuit before it can carry on into the next day in the form of psychotic thoughts.

    Or, if it’s not easy to set it up as a pre-slumber routine, then do it as a during-slumber one: playing pleasant sounds (music, natural phenomena [wind, waves, water]) to him during his sleep. This might stop the nasty dreams from entering, leaving the brain waking up with only pleasant vibes, or at least nothing nasty.

    I say the above because I listen (in rotation) to a couple of YouTube story-telling channels to help me sleep. Most of the stories are set in ancient China, with a lot of them featuring humans saving some animal that then comes back later to repay its debt, which is nice content. I usually fall asleep within the first couple of lines.

    If I don’t fall asleep that quickly, I spend the time listening out for things that I can use in my teaching (the stories are narrated in Mandarin), which is another distraction factor — stops my mind from thinking about horrible people and horrible things. I call it Distraction Therapy, with gardening, healing and teaching being my usual Distraction Therapy tools.