新托福阅读材料：How To Tame Your Nightmares

驯服噩梦

In the new movie, 'Inception,' a master thief is able to infiltrate peoples' dreams and steal their subconscious secrets -- even plant a dream idea they'll think is their own.As fantastical as that seems, an evolving area of sleep research holds that it is possible for people to direct their own dreams, in a limited way.For example, people who suffer from recurring nightmares can learn to substitute happier endings. Practitioners of lucid dreaming -- who train themselves to be aware that they are dreaming -- say they can try out fantasies like flying.

在新电影《盗梦空间》(Inception)中，大盗能够潜入人们的梦中，偷走他们潜意识中的秘密──甚至还能植入梦的构思，让人们以为那是自己的梦。正如它所展现的奇妙想象一样，一个发展之中的睡眠研究领域认为，人们可以有限地指挥自己的梦。例如，反复做噩梦的人可以学会用更快乐的梦境结局取而代之。清醒梦境的实践者──训练自己意识到在做什么梦的人──说，他们可以在梦中尝试像飞行这样的幻想。

Ordering up a dream about a nagging personal problem is difficult, but possible, says Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. 'As you go to bed tonight, really think about some of those emotional issues that you haven't wanted to deal with. You've got about a 10% to 20% shot.'

哈佛医学院(Harvard Medical School)的精神病学副教授罗伯特•斯蒂克戈尔德(Robert Stickgold)说，控制关于烦人的个人问题的梦很难，但却是可能的。“如果你今晚上床时考虑过某些你不想处理的感情问题，那么你梦到这些问题的几率约为10%至20%。”

That fits with the current understanding of what dreams are and why we have them. Once thought to represent repressed sexual urges, or simply neurons firing randomly, dreams are now believed to be mash-ups created by the unconscious mind as it processes, sorts and stores emotions from the day.'We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night,' says Rosalind Cartwright, an emeritus professor of at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has spent nearly 50 years studying sleep and dreams.

这与目前人们对梦是什么以及我们为何会做梦的理解相符。人们曾经认为梦表示被压抑的性冲动，或只是随机的神经元放电，但现在人们认为，梦是由潜意识处理、分类和储存白天的情感时产生的混合产物。“我们带着问题入睡，在夜里处理这些问题，”位于芝加哥的拉什大学医学中心(Rush University Medical Center)的神经学荣誉退休教授罗莎琳德•卡特赖特(Rosalind Cartwright)说。她曾花了近50年的时间研究睡眠和梦。

Her new book, 'The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,' explains that the mind latches onto some thread of unfinished emotional business from the day. Then, in REM sleep (the rapid eye movement period when most dreaming occurs), it calls up bits of older memories that are somehow related, and melds them together. 'That's why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,' she says. 'They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.'

她的新书《24小时思维》(The Twenty-Four Hour Mind)解释说，思想依附于某些白天未完成的情感事务的线索。然后，在快速眼动睡眠(多数梦产生时的快速眼球运动时期)中，它将唤起一些有关系的旧记忆，并将其糅合起来。“这就是为什么梦看来如此奇特。你的旧记忆和新记忆相互交织着”，她说。“这种联系是情感联系，而不是逻辑联系。”

Usually, people work through the most negative emotions first, and their dreams become more positive as the night goes on. (How do researchers know that? 'The old-fashioned way. We wake them up and ask them,' Dr. Cartwright says.)But nightmares interrupt that process; people usually wake up before the frightening emotion is resolved, so the dream keeps repeating.

通常，人们首先解决最负面的情感，当夜渐深时，梦就会变得更积极。(研究人员是如何知道这个的?“最老套的方法。我们把他们叫醒，然后问他们，”卡特赖特说。)但是噩梦打断了这个过程;人们通常在恐惧情绪抒解之前醒来，因此梦一直重复。

'Your brain seems to think that it's helping you to prepare, but you don't allow yourself to finish it so it becomes a broken record,' says Shelby Freedman Harris, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y.Dr. Harris's program is one of a small number around the country that helps nightmare sufferers and people with post-traumatic stress disorder learn to rewrite the script of their recurring dreams using a technique called Image Rehearsal Therapy.

“大脑似乎认为这有助于帮助你做好准备，但你不允许自己做完这个梦，因此它会反复出现，”位于纽约州布朗克斯(Bronx)的孟特菲尔医疗中心(Montefiore Medical Center)的行为睡眠医疗项目总监谢尔比•弗里德曼•哈里斯(Shelby Freedman Harris)说。哈里斯负责的项目是美国为数不多的项目之一，这些项目帮助噩梦患者和创伤后压力心理障碍症患者利用被称为“意象排演治疗”的方法去改变他们反复出现的梦境。