Sinead Corcoran Dye: How to hack your bad dreams and get a better night’s sleep

If a dream is persistent, it means there’s an unresolved issue at play. Photo / Getty Images

There are simple steps you can take to help alleviate recurring nightmares.

Some people on antidepressants might know how much your dreams can get cooked by selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These commonly prescribed pills, which me help enormously during the day, can turn against me at night by giving me vivid and extreme dreams.

This happens because the drugs increase the levels of certain neurotransmitters during REM sleep – but also depression itself, or any experience that’s had a strong emotional impact, can contribute to disturbing dreams.

I have been plagued by the same recurring nightmare for the past eight years since my mum died. I will shield you from the details because it’s simply too awful, but it involves her being furious at me.

Since going on antidepressants the dream has only become more intense and I’ll wake up in the morning in an absolute state, utterly rattled for the rest of the day.

I already go to therapy every week, and also see a psychiatrist who manages my medications but, because of this hideous nightmare, I’ve been keen to do dream therapy for ages.

And while dream therapy may sound like the ultimate in self-indulgent millennial BS, it has a long history and was a source of fascination for founding fathers of psychology Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They believed dreams could teach us about the unconscious mind, and research around the purpose of dreams has accelerated rapidly since the second half of the 20th century.

In 2012, psychotherapists Melinda Powell and Nigel Hamilton founded the Dream Research Institute, a specialist hub within the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education in London.

“There is a kind of attitude out there that dreams are just random firings of the brain at night,” says Powell, author of The Hidden Lives of Dreams.

“Actually, the research over the last 50 years – especially the last 20 – is revealing more and more purposes for dreams for our neurological health.”

So, I teed up a Zoom meeting with Margaret Bowater, a senior counsellor with a specialty in dreamwork.

She advised me that if a dream is persistent, it means there’s an unresolved issue at play.

In our session she asked me to “reimagine the ending” of my dream, and we did some virtual “chair work”, which is where you take turns being yourself and the other person in your dream and have a conversation to nut out the issue.

She then invited me to create a new ending for the dream. She says a reoccurring dream happens when your brain has created a deep pathway or pattern – but by creating a new ending we are “changing the channel” and it should affect the way the dream goes the next time you have it.

Bowater says she sees clients for anything between a single session to a few, it just depends on the severity of their dreams and how much they’re plaguing the person. But it’s not just nightmare sufferers who could benefit from dream work, she says it’s a good idea for everyone to keep a dream diary to unpack the meaning of their dreams, and to even have a ‘dream buddy’ – a trusted person you can share your dreams with so you’re not stuck carrying them around all day.

She recommends repeating this exercise a few times to really cement in your mind the new ending of what you want to happen in your dream. While we may not be able to pick our own dreams (how cool would that be?) with a little practice we may have more control over them than we think.