Summary: I had the same recurring nightmare over and over after my trauma. Do you have that? Whether you do or not dreams can be a powerful tool in your post-trauma recovery. Created in the subconscious mind dreams let you know what your mind is struggling with, organizing, trying to synthesize or just plain stuck on. My guest this week, Dr. Bruce Dow, is an expert in helping survivors harness the power of dreams in recovery. We discussed: The role of dreaming in memory + how the system is overwhelmed by trauma How we do this in treatment Stories of success + the use of medication Why nightmares happen and how to interrupt and change them a dream revision technique can you do today And a whole lot more! Dr. Dow even worked with a caller to help him walk through the dream revision technique on the air. Many times you'll see a progression in your dreams. We covered how and why this happens as we answered questions posted on our fanpage. If you want to know how to begin taking back control over your REM sleep, this is definitely a show that will give you ideas. MEET MY GUEST: Bruce Dow, M.D. is a board-certified psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist with more than twenty years of experience in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Dow became interested in PTSD in 1991 during his psychiatry residency and fellowship training at the San Diego VA Medical Center. This was the period of the first Gulf War, and many Vietnam veterans with PTSD were appearing at VA hospitals seeking treatment. Dr. Dow utilized a technique for treating combat-related PTSD by changing Vietnam veterans’ nightmares in a group therapy setting. The results were dramatic. Recurrent nightmares that had been present for twenty five years (1968 to 1993) disappeared following a single group therapy session. Between 1994 and 2007 Dr. Dow was in private practice in the San Diego community, receiving referrals from the VA for outpatient treatment of combat-related PTSD, as well as referrals of police officers, prison guards, high school teachers, cashiers, construction workers, and others with PTSD from the civilian workplace. He was able to utilize the same dream revision techniques to treat both military and civilian PTSD, as he describes in a book currently in preparation. Dr. Dow was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1960 and spent a year in Europe as a Fulbright Fellow. His interests in the humanities and sciences consolidated during his year abroad and led him to attend medical school at the University of Rochester with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist. After an internship in medicine at Johns Hopkins he fulfilled his Vietnam War era military service obligation as a researcher in neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He continued his neuroscience research from 1967 to 1989, ultimately becoming a tenured full professor at the State University of New York (Buffalo). He has published many articles on color vision and visual perception. In 1989 Dr. Dow finally entered psychiatry, which had by this time evolved from its psychoanalytic roots to encompass neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Armed with his strong neuroscience background, he completed residency and fellowship training in psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He spent a year (1993-1994) on the UCSD faculty, setting up an inpatient program in PTSD at the San Diego, VA Medical Center. In 1994-2007 Dr. Dow was in private practice in the San Diego community, where he maintained a subspecialty in treating individuals with PTSD. In 2007 Dr. Dow returned home to the Boston area, where he is employed as a community psychiatrist with a non-profit corporation (Vinfen), helping clients with significant mental illness, including PTSD, live independently in the community.
