Imagine what it would be like to sleep peacefully through the night—even after some distressing event!  What if you could wake up quickly if you really needed to, but you didn’t wake up from dreams or wake up in fear?  Wonder what it would feel like to teach someone a skill (a skill they will also carry with them in the future) that would allow them to have freedom from disabling nightmares?  And what if this could happen without drugs or years of therapy?

Dr. Beverly Dexter, author of No More Nightmares: How to Use Planned Dream Intervention to End Nightmares, explains in the book and class that having distressing or disturbing content in dreams is normal when people have disturbing experiences.  When dreaming about combat or any other very emotional event, your brain is trying to resolve the overwhelming aspects of the experience while consolidating memories needed for survival.  The process of how dreams help to resolve emotional disturbance is called ‘dream work,’ and that dream work occurs at the neuron level, not at a conscious psychological level. 

Although your dream content may be important, you don’t need to try to interpret it.  Many normal healthy individuals have quite violent or alarming content in their dreams after experiencing combat or other disturbing events.  However, violent dreams do not create violent behavior; it is the other way around.  When you have violent experiences, you are extremely likely to have violent or shocking content in your dreams.  The dream content does not have anything to do with your morals or values, it has to do with how the human brain processes information at the cellular level in order to resolve distress and achieve balance in your body.  When you start using the Planned Dream Intervention skill you are going to start sleeping through the night and not physically acting out the events of the dream so you probably won’t even remember what you dreamt. You can learn to sleep through whatever the dreams are and wake up feeling rested in the morning.  So if you sleep peacefully are you even going to care what you were dreaming? 

Dr Dexter developed this theory in 2001 and has taught the skill to several thousand people world-wide, including in a combat zone, with very unusual success.  Most individuals who learn how to use this skill are no longer woken up by nightmares after the first night that they use the intervention.  This is much more rapid resolution of nightmares than any other currently used behavioral method of treating nightmares.  The PDI skill is also a permanently learned skill much the same as when a child learns how to be potty-trained and their sleeping brain never forgets that skill.  This usually results in uninterrupted sleep and being able to fall asleep more easily.  So, in addition to not being scared by dreams, the person gets much better quality sleep.  It is important to know also, that even if you are dreaming about an event that really happened the event is not happening while you are dreaming about it—it is already over.  Your brain is trying to process the experience at a cellular level in order to reduce the distress associated with the event. 

Practice of the Planned Dream Intervention skill will help with more than just one set of dreams though.  The skill allows you to teach your sleeping brain that there is no such thing as a bad dream.  This means that in the future if some other distressing event occurs your sleeping brain will allow you to sleep through whatever you need to dream.  You will be able to wake up when you need to but won’t have to wake up from dreams anymore.  Additionally, parents who learn to use this skill will be able to teach a ‘child-friendly’ version of the skill to their children, giving them a gift that will help them to enjoy more restful sleep now and in the future.

Training provided to health professionals will allow attendees to teach the skill to their individual clients.  This creates a very powerful positive partnership and an expectation of health.  Given the wealth of research showing the connections between disrupted sleep, insomnia, TBI, PTSD, depression, poorer physical recovery, suicide and higher risk of suicide of adolescent children of parents with insomnia, this is a critical alliance we must create with clients!  Because the Planned Dream Intervention is a learned skill and not a psychotherapy session, any health care professional working with a patient may be able to reinforce the skill.  Physical Therapists, Nurses, Medics and others spend a large amount of time with patients and these are many opportunities to reinforce healthy practice of the PDI skill.  Health Professional attendees will receive the basic training and additional case examples to further demonstrate the Planned Dream Intervention theory.