A scientist believes he has uncovered a potential cure for nightmares by helping people 'control' their dreams.
All you need to do is employ a combination of three techniques, which help people improve the quality of their sleep and encourage a 'lucid dream state'.
This is where the dreamer becomes aware they are asleep and can then control their dreams.
Dr Denholm Aspy, from the University of Adelaide's School of Psychology, is developing more effective lucid dream induction techniques.
The results from his studies, published in the journal Dreaming, investigated the effectiveness of three different lucid dream induction techniques:
Reality testing - which involves checking your environment several times a day to see whether or not you're dreaming
Wake back to bed - waking up after five hours, staying awake for a short period, then going back to sleep in order to enter a REM sleep period, in which dreams are more likely to occur
MILD (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams) - which involves waking up after five hours of sleep and then developing the intention to remember that you are dreaming before returning to sleep, by repeating the phrase: "The next time I'm dreaming, I will remember that I'm dreaming."You also imagine yourself in a lucid dream
Among the of 47 people who employed all three techniques, 17 per cent had lucid dreams over the period of just one week - significantly higher compared to a baseline week where they didn't practise any techniques.
Those who were able to go to sleep within the first five minutes of completing the MILD technique, the success rate of lucid dreaming was even nearly half of all attempts.
"The MILD technique works on what we call 'prospective memory' - that is, your ability to remember to do things in the future," said Dr Aspy.
"By repeating a phrase that you will remember you're dreaming, it forms an intention in your mind that you will, in fact, remember that you are dreaming, leading to a lucid dream.
"Importantly, those who reported success using the MILD technique were significantly less sleep deprived the next day, indicating that lucid dreaming did not have any negative effect on sleep quality.
"These results take us one step closer to developing highly effective lucid dream induction techniques that will allow us to study the many potential benefits of lucid dreaming, such as treatment for nightmares and improvement of physical skills and abilities through rehearsal in the lucid dream environment."
Dr Aspy is conducting more research into the lucid dream technique.
A new study is open to any English-speaking people aged 18 and over anywhere in the world. For more information and to take part in the study, visit here.
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