Sleep & Insomnia · Hypnosis session
The Best-Evidenced Treatment for Recurring Nightmares Is Free, and You Do It Awake.
The same dream, most weeks, for months. There is a treatment for it with better evidence than anything else on this page, and it costs nothing: you rewrite the dream in daylight and practise the new version. First, two questions that decide whether this page is yours.
Stop Recurring Nightmares
Just under twenty-three minutes, aimed at the dread of going up to bed that builds around a nightmare you already know — not at the dream itself, which the free rewriting handles.
US$18.95one-off · no subscription · about A$27
I earn a commission if you buy through this page. It doesn’t change what you pay, and it doesn’t decide what I recommend.
Checkout opens on hypnosisdownloads.com in a new tab. Priced in US dollars; some cards add a foreign-transaction fee. Ninety days to change your mind, nothing to justify.
Chosen by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →
Is this the one you keep getting?
- You know how it ends while it is running, because it ended that way before
- The same corridor, the same stairwell, small details swapped out
- Sitting up near half four with the doona kicked off
- You put off going up at eleven, and you know exactly why
- You have told nobody, because a grown adult saying “bad dreams” sounds like nothing
Nodding by the third line, keep reading. If what wakes you carries no dream, start here.
First question: is the dream a memory?
Not a dream that resembles something, but one that replays an event you were in: the impact, the ward, the callout. Recurring nightmares are a core symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine puts the share of people with PTSD reporting them at up to 80 per cent.
A dream that replays something real belongs with a psychologistStart with a GP and ask about a Mental Health Treatment Plan: Medicare rebates for up to ten psychology sessions a year. Eligibility is your GP’s judgement and the rebate is partial, so ask about the gap.
Then ask for the treatment by name. Phoenix Australia’s Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Acute Stress Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Complex PTSD strongly recommend five things in adults: trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, cognitive processing therapy, trauma-focused cognitive therapy, prolonged exposure, and EMDR.
Second question: could something you take be doing this?
The cheapest thing to check, and the most often skipped. The same paper gives the mechanism: drugs acting on noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine can produce nightmares, and so can withdrawal of drugs that suppress REM. The usual names are beta blockers and some antidepressants.
Alcohol and cannabis suppress REM too, so cutting either after months of steady use brings it back with interest — which is why the dreams arrive in the fortnight you stopped, not the one you were using. The DSM-5 lists disturbing dreams among the criteria for cannabis withdrawal, starting within a day or three and settling over a fortnight.
None of it is a reason to stop anything. It is a reason for one appointment, with the packet in your bag and the date the dreams started.
Breathing first, and that means a GP and a sleep studyIf you snore, gasp or choke once under, someone has watched your breathing stop, or a full night in bed leaves you wrung out. Untreated sleep apnoea is a cardiovascular risk, no audio touches it, and it drags people out of REM with a dream still running.
Three others belong in that appointment: legs that crawl the moment you settle, thyroid disease, and sleep that went wrong after your mood dropped.
Is this a nightmare or a night terror?
The words get swapped; the events differ in kind. A nightmare is REM: second half of the night, you wake properly, know where you are, can tell somebody the plot. A night terror comes out of deep non-REM sleep in the first few hours — a scream, bolt upright, eyes open on nothing — and the person is not awake and remembers nothing.
Sleep terrors, sleepwalking and sleep talking are parasomnias, with their own management and their own safety questions. The publisher has titles for them; I don’t sell them.
Why does the same dream keep coming back?
REM periods lengthen towards morning, which is why the dream turns up at four or five rather than midnight. As for the recurrence, which people read as a message: a dream is closer to a script, and the scripts that run are the ones run before. Nothing is being sent to you. Something is being replayed.
The damage is done in daylight. After the third or fourth time you carry it out of the bedroom: over it again in the shower, a check at eleven on whether tonight feels like one. That is rehearsal, and the only rehearsal you are doing.
Stop Recurring NightmaresUS$18.95 · instant download · full refund within 90 days if it isn’t right.
Opens the publisher’s checkout in a new tab. Or keep reading — the free techniques below cost nothing.
What is actually recommended for nightmares?
Unusually for this cluster, there is a clean answer. In June 2018 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a position paper on nightmare disorder in adults: Morgenthaler and colleagues, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 14(6).
Exactly one treatment is recommended: image rehearsal therapy, for PTSD-associated nightmares and for nightmare disorder. Everything else lands at “may be used”, the evidence being less clear either way — CBT, EMDR, lucid dreaming, hypnosis, a page of medicines. Clonazepam and venlafaxine are not recommended at all.
Prazosin is the drug most people are offered, and the task force lowered its confidence in it after a trial across thirteen US veterans’ centres, 304 participants, found no difference from placebo — while still calling it their first pharmacological choice. Nightmare disorder affects about 4 per cent of adults. No formal grading system was used, so take the ranking seriously and the precision less so.
What can you do tonight, for nothing?
Imagery rehearsal therapy is three moves and a pen. The protocol:
- Write one nightmare down, and not your worst one
Daylight, paper, past tense, as it runs. Pick one that troubles you rather than the one that frightens you most: the trial used less intense dreams, steering around trauma content. If every dream replays something real, take it to the psychologist instead.
- Change it. Any way you wish, and change it early
Close to what participants were told: change the nightmare any way you wish. It needn’t be plausible, dignified or a victory. Change the door. Change who is standing there. Change what the thing turns out to be, and write it out in full. Change something early rather than rescuing the last five seconds.
- Rehearse the new version awake, ten to twenty minutes a day
This is the treatment, and the part everybody skips. Sit down in daylight, eyes closed, run the new dream as a film at its own pace. Not in bed, not at lights out. Participants were told five to twenty minutes daily, never more than two dreams a week.
- Change what you do in the ninety seconds afterwards
Lying there at half four going over it is rehearsal too, of the wrong version. Get up. Low light, out of the room, something dull on paper, back when sleepy — stimulus control, on the insomnia page. Run the new version, not the old.
Now the numbers. Krakow and colleagues randomised 168 women with chronic nightmares and PTSD after sexual assault to imagery rehearsal or a waiting list (JAMA, 2001): two three-hour group sessions and an hour of follow-up. At three months, nights with nightmares improved at a Cohen’s d of 1.15 against 0.07 in controls, CAPS severity at 1.53. A third did not complete.
Pooled, it holds. Hansen and colleagues, Clinical Psychology Review, 2013: Hedges’ g of 1.04 for nightmare frequency, 0.92 for PTSD severity. Casement and Swanson pooled thirteen trials a year earlier, effects still there at six to twelve months — and named the weakness themselves. Against an active treatment, they were small.
Self-help sizing matters, since that is what you would be doing. Lancee, Spoormaker and van den Bout randomised 399 people from a Dutch nightmare website to self-help imagery rehearsal, exposure, a diary, or a waiting list (2010). Both active arms beat the waiting list, at around 0.25 to 0.56 — well short of therapist-delivered.
So what is a twenty-three minute recording for?
The fair question, and I have spent this page making it harder to answer. Hypnosis is in that position paper, at “may be used”. Behind the rating sit two small case series: ten patients in one, three in the other, neither controlled. Thirteen people, against a pooled effect near 1.0.
So the case for buying is narrow, and not about the dream. It is about eleven o’clock — the reluctance to go up, the bracing, bed as a place where something happens to you. That anticipation behaves like anxiety, the half hypnosis has most to say about.
If you do one thing from this page, do the rewriting. Buy the session as well if you want the bedtime half covered, and skip it if money is tight. What I don’t want is a purchase standing in for ten minutes with a pen. That costs more than twenty-seven dollars.
The sentence to keepThe version you practise is the version that plays. You are already practising one.
Why pay for this when YouTube is free?
A competent sleep hypnosis recording is a minute away, free. One of the biggest is Michael Sealey’s, and he is Australian; if his voice already gets you down, this page has nothing to sell you. No research shows a paid recording hypnotises anyone better.
The argument belonging here is what gets handed to you next. Someone frightened of what happens when they close their eyes needs the following twenty minutes to be predictable, and a streaming platform promises the opposite. Search the word once and it keeps offering nightmare material back at eleven.
A file you own was chosen once, in daylight. It plays offline, with no advertisement at minute nine and nothing queued behind it. If that is not your bedroom, use the free one.
What is in the Stop Recurring Nightmares session?
Twenty-two minutes fifty-nine seconds of gentle, permissive hypnosis, built for repeated nightly use. There is no free sample of this one, unlike some of their titles, so you buy it on description.
One thing worth flagging. The publisher’s description leans on the idea that nightmares are symbolic representations of unfulfilled fears from the day before — a theory rather than a finding, and not the model the recommended treatment runs on. Imagery rehearsal works whether the dream means anything or not.
Stop Recurring Nightmares
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 22 minutes 59 seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott of Uncommon Knowledge, publishing since 1998
- Instant MP3 download plus the publisher’s app — any device, unlimited listens
- Aimed at the dread of going up, not at the dream — the rewriting does that
Opens the publisher’s secure checkout · no account needed
Figures the publisher reports about itself: trading since 1998, upwards of 24,000 people trained in person, over 5,000 clients seen individually, and 473 purchases of this title.
They also report 97% satisfaction from 9,604 surveyed — the support desk, not the recording.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose nights are describing something a recording cannot reach. If the list below is your week, what you need is an appointment with someone who can change the plan as it goes.
- The dream replays an event you were actually in.
- You snore, gasp or choke, or a full night in bed leaves you wrung out.
- You remember nothing, and somebody else describes the screaming, or you act dreams out.
- They began or worsened within weeks of a new medicine, or of cutting alcohol or cannabis.
- Your mood dropped before the nights did, or has dropped since.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
- You are drinking to get to sleep, which buys the first half of the night and charges for the second.
All of those are questions for a doctor rather than a checkout, the fourth more urgently than it looks.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about recurring nightmares
Why do I keep having the same nightmare?
A dream behaves more like a rehearsed script than a message, and the scripts most likely to run are the ones that have run before. Going back over it by day is rehearsal too, so the version you have is the one being practised.
What is imagery rehearsal therapy, and can I do it alone?
You write one nightmare down in daylight, change it any way you wish, then rehearse the new version awake for ten to twenty minutes a day. It is the only treatment the 2018 American Academy of Sleep Medicine position paper recommends for nightmare disorder. Self-help versions work, less strongly.
What is the difference between a nightmare and a night terror?
A nightmare is a REM event from the second half of the night: you wake properly, orient within seconds and can describe the plot. A night terror comes out of deep non-REM sleep in the first few hours, with a scream, a racing heart and no memory of it after.
Can medication cause nightmares?
Yes. The 2018 position paper notes that drugs acting on noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine can produce nightmares, and that withdrawal of REM-suppressing drugs can too. Beta blockers and some antidepressants are the usual suspects. Take the packet to your GP rather than stopping anything.
Does hypnosis help with nightmares?
It sits in the position paper at “may be used”, meaning the evidence is unclear either way. Behind that rating are two small case series totalling thirteen patients, neither controlled. Imagery rehearsal pooled above a Hedges’ g of 1.0. A thin basis, and worth saying so.
What if the session does nothing for me?
You send the publisher your order number inside 90 days and the money comes back in full, no explanation required. One refund per customer. Nobody can say in advance how a particular voice will sit with a particular person, which is what ninety days covers.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Go Back To SleepIf the cost is the two hours afterwards, whatever woke you
- Night WorryIf what runs at night is thinking, not dreaming
- Cure InsomniaIf it has run for months and taken the days too
If none is yours, the sleep guide lists them all with who each one suits. If the dreams sit inside something bigger, try the anxiety guide.
Whatever you decide about buying, write one dream out tomorrow and change something in it. Ten minutes, free, and the best-evidenced thing here.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
This is the one page here where the free technique plainly beats the thing for sale, and it is in that order on purpose. Writing it that way costs sales. More →
Just under twenty-three minutes, and a refund window of ninety days
If the rewriting is under way and the stairs at eleven are what you can’t argue yourself out of, this is a small thing to run underneath.
US$18.95Instant download · 90-day refund · about A$27 · new tab
This is a self-help audio session, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Nightmares that replay a real event are a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and belong with a psychologist; Australian guidelines recommend trauma-focused therapies, and a GP can start a Mental Health Treatment Plan. Imagery rehearsal therapy, not hypnosis, is what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for nightmare disorder. Snoring, gasping, choking or waking unrefreshed needs assessment for sleep apnoea first; restless legs, thyroid disease and a mood that dropped first belong with a GP. Do not stop or alter a prescribed medicine because of this page. Dream enactment, sleepwalking and sleep terrors need assessment. Never listen at the wheel.