Recovering from PTSD involves a lot of therapy of the kind you're suggesting. But the idea that diminishing the strength/duration of nightmares would somehow interfere either with that therapeutic process or the self's own healing processes seems entirely unsupported.
Obviously a device like this should be used in conjunction with healing therapy. But healing therapy can take a long time, and continuing to suffer nightmares during that process seems counterproductive.
I'll admit I've only looked at PTSD a little bit, but I haven't seen anything indicating that the severity declines with more nightmares. Have you?
And second, you don't need 1,000 nightmares to gather that reporting. Ten or twenty will be sufficient.
But the idea that nightmares need to be kept ongoing has absolutely no basis.
Glad we've established the principles and now we're just arguing over the details :)
Your point was that nightmares need to continue in order to heal.
My point is that they don't. There is zero benefit to that, only harm. The 10-20 nightmares I'm referring to can be referenced from the past. They're not about benefit from future ones.
And also you don't need the nightmares at all, because there are plenty of other sources of material.
You're already misrepresenting the utility of nightmares in therapy. Please don't misrepresent me as agreeing with you as well.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that your comments are in agreement with @nonrandomstring's comments.
You did happen to admit to the efficacy of experiencing nightmares as a means of reflection[0] and are now only trying to argue that 1) it's not necessary for nightmares to be experienced past a certain point[1] and 2) it's possible for this reflection to be done via other means[0]. @nonrandomstring's point[2] has been that experiencing the nightmares is therapeutic as a means of reflection.
To speak to possibly why this miscommunication happened, I can look at their comments and see places where they could use "a" instead of "the" or "can be" instead of "is" but it's worth noting that I can also look at your comments and see similar things.
[0] > First, it's one stream of reporting among many.
[1] > And second, you don't need 1,000 nightmares to gather that reporting. Ten or twenty will be sufficient.
[2] > Suppressing them may not be helpful and actually just kick the can down the road.
I really wish that, had I said;
"Glad we've established a principle and now we're just arguing over
some details"
Two things make me think that.
One is that immediately I was deluged with low-rent "show us proof" comments, which frankly seem childish because a cursory search on "why we dream" would turn up hundreds of results, many theories and links to experimental evidence that are widely considered common sense today. I subsequently replied with links to some of the lowest hanging fruit in recent psychology literature.
The other is that a simple, sincere question designed to open up a discussion and get to the nub of the matter was immediately and tactically downvoted to -3. Does the question "why do people have nightmares?" strike anyone as provocative, sarcastic, fulminating or in bad faith?
I think what happened here in this thread remains as evidence for coordinated resistance to rational enquiry and supports my case that there are elements of anti-intellectualism here on HN.
Honestly I only think that those who hold opinions like yours (without any factual support) are a cancer, but besides the point: Can you please provide any peer reviewed research to support your opinion?
> Currently, NightWare is prescribed to 400 patients in the US, 98 percent of whom are active-duty military or veterans. A new study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that participants who used NightWare at least 50 percent of the time had significantly better self-reported sleep quality compared to participants not using NightWare. “The results of our first published clinical trial demonstrate NightWare’s efficacy, and Apple technology is a critical part of that,” says Hannah, NightWare’s CEO. “NightWare benefits from so many of the singular features of the Apple ecosystem — the hardware and design of Apple Watch, the quality control standards, the ease of software integration and deployment — it all comes together to create a system that is changing lives.”
I understand these treatments are necessary and let people live when life might otherwise be intolerable. But there’s definitely a wider discussion to be had addressing the extent to which our mental health apparatus is designed to suppress symptoms rather than to become healthier.
Is it not extraordinarily obvious that treating the symptoms instead of the cause is bad medicine.
If there is a "deeper" point it is to question why shallow, expedient, temporary symptomatic treatment is valued above long-term root-cause change. I guess that's a question of our age.
Treating PTSD is easier than creating a world without trauma.
What if there is no known way to treat the cause?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-022-06212-7
In fact, this may treat most neurological disorders. Increasing nNOS as a treatment has been overlooked for the last two decades.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2413191/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01664...
This is how I cured my Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gbb.12193
There's no blinding and no placebo control and no comparison of measurable results over a long period of study.
Functional threat modelling for templating past events onto avoiding future harms, Valli,Revonsuo et al (Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku)
"The threat simulation theory of dreaming (TST) () states that dream consciousness is essentially an ancient biological defence mechanism, evolutionarily selected for its capacity to repeatedly simulate threatening events."
Integration and consolidation of past events. Physiology and psychology of dreams, Alan S Eiser (Department of Neurology, University of Michigan Sleep Disorders Center Ann Arbor)
"... direct and systematic investigation could be made of such
topics as the occurrence, qualities, recollection, and childhood
development of dreaming...neurobiological research, including
lesion and brain imaging studies, have established a clearer view
of the functional neuroanatomy of REM sleep and dreaming."
"The processes by which dreaming aids in the ongoing integration of
affects into the mind are approached here from complementary
psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic perspectives. One relevant
notion is that the dream provides a psychological space wherein
overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex affects that under
waking conditions are subject to dissociation, splitting, or
disavowal may be brought together for observation by the dreaming
ego."
I think stuckness is a good metaphor. And yes I see where you are going with that - persistent nightmares are taxing, waking up feeling physically drained etc. There seems a strong case for instrumental suppression, much as anti-depressants can help set the necessary conditions for long-term therapy.
But I'd take the metaphor further and suggest the nightmares are processes that are signalling, but those signals are not acted upon. We sometimes need help in interpreting and verbalising those signals so that we can hear them ourselves. My objection would be to blocking those signals as a first recourse (and allowing that to become a normalised response to intrusive reliving as other self-medication is so often with veterans I've had contact with).