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Everyone has nightmares sometimes. But for people with PTSD, it's different.
Sam Brace doesn't want to talk about what he saw when he was a soldier in Iraq eight years ago. In fact, it's something he's actively trying not to dwell on. But what he can't control are his dreams.
They're almost always about the same explosion. "When I was overseas, we'd hit an IED," Brace says. "When I have a nightmare, normally it's something related to that."
Healthy dreams seem kind of random, according to Steven Woodward, a psychologist with the National Center for PTSD at the VA Medical Center in Menlo Park, Calif. "They're wacky," he says. "They associate lots of things that are not normally associated."
PTSD dreams are the same real-life event played over and over again like a broken record. "Replicative nightmares of traumatic events ... repeat for years," Woodward says. "Sometimes 20 years."
Scientists wanted to find out the reason why people with PTSD can't sleep and dream normally. One theory comes from Matthew Walker, a psychology researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. His particular interest lies in rapid eye movement, or REM. It's the time during sleep when a lot of dreaming occurs.
