What's the News: Recurring nightmares can cast a pall over anyone's waking life, and for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder
, they can also contribute to panic attacks, flashbacks, and violent behavior. Can soothing, dream-like experiences in a virtual world, entered immediately after a nightmare runs its course, tame those bad dreams? It seems like a kind of real-life inception
, but it's not as far fetched as you'd think: the Army is investigating just such a treatment, Dawn Lim at Wired's Danger Room reports
. How the Heck:
The idea builds on existing treatments used for PTSD, including image rehearsal therapy, in which therapists work with patients to identify triggers and devise ways to defuse them, and biofeedback, in which patients watch real-time data on their stress levels on a computer screen and observe how different relaxation techniques help bring the levels to normal.
In the proposed treatment, a ...
