In the summer of 2023, a group of researchers published an article in which they boldly claimed they could heal post-traumatic stress disorder in six days. The training was conducted by Charlie Morley, a teacher of lucid dreaming and author of books on the subject. Recently, he gave a detailed interview on the podcast Mad in America about his past work and future plans.
One of Morley’s main messages is not to fight nightmares. If you find yourself in a terrifying dream (and even if you realize that you are dreaming) and want to escape, do not wake up. Each time you intentionally interrupt the nightmare by waking up, it must be repeated because it is similar to an interrupted therapy session. In almost all cases, nightmares play a healing role. If a client has deep trauma but no nightmares, it concerns the psychologist; when nightmares are present, it means that an internal healing mechanism is at work.
Furthermore, multiple sudden awakenings times during the night can be used as a pathway to lucid dreaming. Over one-third of all spontaneous lucid dreams (LDs) start as nightmares. It is easier to become conscious during a scary dream than a pleasant one. As Morley explains, when one researcher asked how many LDs they planned to experience in a week, he had to be honest: possibly none. However, in the end, the success rate was high, with approximately 75% of participants having LDs, and many became lucid immediately after the course. Morley added that it’s “a bit like [how] your muscles don’t grow in the gym, it’s afterwards.”
A reevaluation for PTSD done a week after the experiment showed that the disorder scores were so low for 85% of the participants that they were no longer classified as suffering from PTSD. When analyzing the data, the scientists initially thought there was an error and had to double-check the results. They also struggled to publish the study for a long time as scientific journal editors were hesitant to take responsibility for acknowledging such bold results.
However, they were later granted funding for a controlled study involving one hundred participants, which their team completed a few months ago. According to Morley, they achieved similar results, but the final data will be disclosed later.
What do you do when you find yourself in a nightmare?
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