The 10 minutes of peace were the only part of the protocol that doctors in the study mostly didn’t follow. “Surgery,” says Chow, “functions like Southwest Airlines.” Most patients were awakened swiftly to clear space in the recovery rooms for the next patients. Still, the positive effects held.
Pilleriin Sikka, a researcher at Stanford and an author of the paper, hopes that with such a low-effort prompt, it may be possible to run other experiments investigating whether dreaming under anesthesia can help with patient satisfaction after surgery, and whether it can help patients better recover from trauma.
Can dreaming under anesthesia be therapeutic?
There are signs the answer may be yes. “With nighttime dreams, we don’t know what they do,” says Konkoly. “Messing with them is useful for understanding what they do, and potentially helpful when dreams go awry.” Anesthesia dreams, however, are happening in an artificial setting, she says, and inducing them and potentially manipulating them may have more in common with psychedelic therapies for PTSD, which are a subject of active research, than with manipulating dreams during natural sleep.
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