Army to Test ‘Power Dreaming’ to Combat PSTD-Related Nightmares

The U.S. Army recently awarded a contracting firm a nearly half a million dollar contract to support its “Power Dreaming Project.”

Wired Danger Room reports the following scenario that the Army hopes to begin testing next here to help soldiers suffering with PSTD:

A soldier tries to sleep. But he is not safe in his dreams. Jolted awake by a nightmare, the combat veteran fumbles in the dark for his 3-D glasses.

He puts them on. Around him are the faces of people whom he trusts. They fight the darkness with him. The soldier’s re-lived this scene in his head and the laboratory over and over again, until it has become reassuringly familiar. The soldier knows that his pixelated friends will take him away from these troubled dreams. When the scene is over, he takes off his goggles and looks around him. The soldier is home.

The research for this sort of therapy will take place at the Naval Hospital Bremerton, Wash. According to the National Center for PSTD, run through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, while only 5 percent of the general population complain of nightmares, the number jumps to 52 percent for combat veterans.

This new research is a similar build off of what the National Center for PSTD calls Imagery Rehersal Therapy:

In IRT, the person who is having nightmares, while awake, changes how the nightmare ends so that it no longer upsets them. Then the person replays over and over in their minds the new dream with the non-scary ending. Research shows that this type of treatment can reduce how often nightmares occur.

The hope is that these “power dreams” can be watched from laptops and “home training and 3-D goggles work to gradually enhance the strength of these new neurological images,” according to the presentation that outlines the program’s aims.

The project is another twist on biofeedback therapy, in which a PTSD-sufferer is fed real-time data on his physical stress levels so that he can be cued to calm down. If he successfully brings down his heart rate and anxiety levels, he may be rewarded with visual cues. One example of this brain-wave therapy is in use to heal troubled veterans.

The problem with existing biofeedback methods is that many patients aren’t able to easily call up imaginary scenarios in their heads that will cue them to relax. So this experiment hopes to get soldiers to custom-design scenes that they can play back to themselves.

The computer program for soldiers to build out imaginary worlds and avatars on will be based on the virtual world Second Life. It will allow dream sequences to be custom designed “to develop physio-emotional states to counteract the reactive stress response inherent in trauma memories.”

Wired states soldiers will use a program called Second Life to customize their dream worlds. Wired also notes, that this is not the sequel script to Inception.

You are wrong.

While the pain of a toothache and say - a broken arm - are created via different circumstances, they are both ailments of the physical body.

Likewise, the brain is not a incorporeal, amorphous blob of energy. It is physical: and mental stress on the psyche is a chemical and/or energetic overwhelming of the physical pathways of the brain.

Proving that is no more difficult than taking a benzodiazepine in the midst of an acute panic attack. Like taking Vicodin for a toothache, the chemical helps to alleviate the physical trauma.

I’m not denying that faith is important in mental health, I’m denying that it’s “everything”.

It takes a true idiot, to conclude that areas of the brain which die and physically atrophy still function.

MRI technology reveals that cells in the brain areas related to the processing of memory actually die off under prolonged trauma. They aren't simply reacting differently...they aren't there.

Your retort proved everything I asserted. You are one with the name it and claim it crowd who denies empirical evidences.

Dead cells cease to function.
Contrary to your assertions.

So your assertion that the PTSD can be cured by prayer and seeking God absent a miraculous regeneration of cells coming from God requires...denying that the cells MRI scans show to die off can't still function despite not being there.

You popped off on this thread making assertions that are no longer tenable unless you deny MRI images. Or deny that brain cells are needed for brain functioning. Those are the only two choices, other than a mea culpa on your part that you haven't kept up with medical science.

But if you haven't kept up with the science, and did not bother to check before your retort...then that pretty much validates my assertion that you advocate ignorance for others, now doesn't it?

I am projecting my belief that dead braincells are a physical problem that needs extensive work to function around and don't go away by wishful thinking or a positive attitude.

It takes a true idiot, to conclude that areas of the brain which die and physically atrophy still function.

MRI technology reveals that cells in the brain areas related to the processing of memory actually die off under prolonged trauma. They aren't simply reacting differently...they aren't there.

Your retort proved everything I asserted. You are one with the name it and claim it crowd who denies empirical evidences.

Dead cells cease to function.
Contrary to your assertions.

So your assertion that the PTSD can be cured by prayer and seeking God absent a miraculous regeneration of cells coming from God requires...denying that the cells MRI scans show to die off can't still function despite not being there.

You popped off on this thread making assertions that are no longer tenable unless you deny MRI images. Or deny that brain cells are needed for brain functioning. Those are the only two choices, other than a mea culpa on your part that you haven't kept up with medical science.

But if you haven't kept up with the science, and did not bother to check before your retort...then that pretty much validates my assertion that you advocate ignorance for others, now doesn't it?

I am projecting my belief that dead braincells are a physical problem that needs extensive work to function around and don't go away by wishful thinking or a positive attitude.

Once again, you're engaging in reactive reading. You're attributing all sorts of things to me that are not in evidence ("You are one with the name it and claim it crowd who denies empirical evidences."). You're claiming that I have said all sorts of things I did not say ("So your assertion that the PTSD can be cured by prayer and seeking God "). I guess those portions of your brain that would have prevented that are dead and gone and have ceased to function.

By the way, my post-graduate and post-doctoral work is in the field of neurobiology, so I know I didn't mean what you apparently mistook me to mean.

While the pain of a toothache and say - a broken arm - are created via different circumstances, they are both ailments of the physical body.

Likewise, the brain is not a incorporeal, amorphous blob of energy. It is physical: and mental stress on the psyche is a chemical and/or energetic overwhelming of the physical pathways of the brain.

Proving that is no more difficult than taking a benzodiazepine in the midst of an acute panic attack. Like taking Vicodin for a toothache, the chemical helps to alleviate the physical trauma.

I'm not denying that. Well, actually, neither medication for the toothache nor medication for the panic attack alleviates physical trauma. Both are involved in modifying signaling pathways to reduce the unpleasant feelings induced by the trauma, whether physical (the toothache) or psychic (the panic attack). I was pointing out, and MrEdd seems to have missed it, that the initial cause of PTSD, unlike a toothache, is psychic, not physical. This doesn't mean that there cannot be injury to the brain that results in all the same effects as PTSD nor does it mean that experiences of a sufficiently shocking character cannot result in changes in the brain. After all, simply memorizing a telephone number results in changes in the brain. I was pointing out that what makes something traumatic, as in PTSD, is not its physicality, but the assault it makes on the victim's perception of the world and his place in it. You could have ADHD or you could have TBI-induced ADHD. The first is idiopathic. The second is clearly induced by physical trauma. PTSD is not induced by physical means, either by disease or by accident, but by one's reaction to whatever causes the trauma. Because of this, whatever may induce that disorder in one person may not induce it in another. Someone may have his arms chopped off by a Hutu and never develop PTSD. Another person may. But the difference in developing the disorder or not doesn't lie in the physicality of losing the limbs or not.

PTSD is a hoax, a fake, like fibromyalgia or Lyme disease. Bunkum and nonsense.

Do you really believe that Lyme disease is a hoax, bunkum and nonsense?

Lyme disease is very real and caused by the bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. Blood tests can detect the disease not only in humans but also in other animals like dogs that contract it from tick bites and suffer from it. It is treated medically with antibiotics. Left untreated Lyme’s can cause permanent nerve damage. Because the symptoms can be vague and general in its early stages and not everyone gets or detects the distinctive “bulls eye” rash because it may be on an area of the body one would not readily seen, like at the back of the neck and or base of the hairline, doctors do not always test for it and people can suffer for quite a while before getting the correct diagnosis and proper treatment.

Now if you are suggesting that there are some people not diagnosed with Lyme’s claim they have it and then blame it for all sorts of unrelated generalized and perhaps psychosomatic illnesses and their mental problems and milk it for sympathy, you might have a point. OTOH, there have been people who have falsely claimed to have cancer, who have done the same thing, but that doesn’t make cancer any less real.

Fibromyalgia I don’t know much about to say one way or another. PTSD – in wars years ago it was often referred to as “shell shock” or “battle fatigue”.

My dad never wanted to talk a lot about it but when he came home near the end of WWII having served in the South Pacific and having been in a lot of battles; the last one on an island near the Philippines in which 2/3 of his infantry unit was killed on a single day including his CO, he described a time that lasted nearly a year that he couldn’t sleep and had horrific nightmares. When he came home his mother expected him to get a job right away and settle down and marry a nice girl and start a family but my dad would have no part of that. He described a time when and some of his GI friends would go into NYC and tear up the town, getting God’s own drunk, getting into fights and causing no end of trouble. This wasn’t typical behavior for my father before the war and it eventually stopped after meeting my mother. But to his dying day in 1997 he was still haunted by some of what he experienced during the war. He didn’t talk about it much, nor did he want to talk about all the metals for valor he had that my brother and I only found out about after he died, but sometimes he would talk about things that still haunted him – his best friend Pinty being mortally wounded by “friendly fire” and holding his hands over the gaping gushing wound in his friends chest while his friend cried out in prayer and called for his mother while a medic frantically and in vein tried to save him. Pinty died in my dad’s arms.

Another incident that haunted my dad was coming across Japanese officer in a building while on patrol in Manilla. My dad and his unit were going from building to building after the second battle of Manilla clearing out pockets of resistance and my dad heard a noise in another room, shouted out in both English and Japanese to “identify” and to come out and surrender and then saw the Japanese officer come through the doorway, his said not a word and his hands were not raised. My dad shot him on sight. As he was going through the dead man’s pockets, as he was instructed to do in case the officer had anything on him useful to turn over to US intelligence, my dad discovered the man was completely unarmed and when going through his wallet found some Catholic prayer cards, Rosary Beads and photographs of the man’s wife and young children.

My dad knew he did the right thing under the circumstance but never the less it haunted him for the rest of his life. The few times he talked about this and his friend Pinty, even more than 40 years later, he’d break down in tears like it had just happened yesterday.

My dad’s bullet and shrapnel wounds healed. But some of the emotional scars never healed completely.

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