One thing that will ruthlessly taint your perfect night of sleep is a vivid nightmare. Waking up in a cold sweat or thrashing around to see if that serial killer is really chasing you can freak you out enough that you don’t even try to fall back asleep.And sleep — not just the number of hours you get but the quality you’re able to achieve — is crucial to your overall well-being. Research continues to find that how you sleep directly affects your physical (including cardiovascular) health and your cognitive function. But you don’t need to see any data to know that you’re much better at life when you’ve had a full night of rest.And nightmares, especially if they’re recurring and wake you up, can be more disruptive to some of us. They can be very stressful to your system because your body doesn’t know they’re not real, according to neuroscientist and dream researcher Karen Konkoly, who joined us — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson — on this week’s episode HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast.Click here to listen to the full episode and learn about why we dream, how we can control them, and much more.Considering how our bodies react to a particularly terrifying nightmare, it’s evident that the lines between reality and dreamland are indeed blurred when we’re jolted awake. And while we can’t avoid the reality of bad dreams completely, there might be a couple of ways to tweak our sleep hygiene for a better chance of peaceful, nightmare-free sleep.Apparently, our bedtime routine — what we do, see and mentally process right before we go to sleep — is worthy of examination if we want to change a negative sleep pattern. “What you’re doing before sleep is, I think, the biggest point of intervention in terms of what you’re going to dream about because your dreams spring from those thoughts that you’re having as you fall asleep,” Konkoly said.“Those moments before sleep are really important for determining what you’re going to dream about,” she added. “It’s a time that people can reclaim since there’s a lot of doomscrolling that happens before sleep.”So what should you try instead of scrolling? Konkoly endorses the idea of a “palate cleanser,” something that your brain can consume that doesn’t induce any stress or negative connotations. A rerun of a mindless show you love — perhaps “The Office” or those ridiculous home-buying shows where moderately wealthy people hem and haw over dormer windows on their potential new summer home in coastal Maine. It could also be calming music or anything else you consider relaxing. “You could consciously consume content that’s more aligned with how you want your night to start,” Konkoly said. She added that dreams are a natural way of processing your feelings so you might begin to ruminate or worry about what’s happened that day or what could happen tomorrow — and that might show up in your dreams later that night. “But if you feel like it’s a pattern and you’re not working through it, you can see if you can take that time to incubate a dream that’s more conscious, that’s more helpful,” she said.“Inception” fears aside, we loved the idea of incubating dreams — especially ones where we’re lying on a white sand beach somewhere with a daiquiri in hand, not a worry in the world. And while we can’t control what’s going to play out in our subconscious, Konkoly believes we can set ourselves up for more successful, less eventful sleep.In this episode, we also delve into how stress affects our dreams, how certain drugs make us forget them altogether, and how to process the repetitive symbolism that may come up in our weirdest dreams, so click above to hear the full episode or listen wherever you get your podcasts.For more from Karen Konkoly, head here.Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.