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Sleep laboratory: rem sleep and dreams SLEEP LABORATORY: REM SLEEP AND DREAMS
In 1953, Dr Natheniel Kleitman, Professor of Physiology at the University of Chicago, made a major discovery about the nature of sleep. He was studying sleep in small babies, and made round-the-clock observations of them. He noticed recurrent rapid movement of the eyeballs beneath the eyelids of these babies. The eyeballs moved for a few minutes, then rested. This recurred nearly every boar. He then started to investigate if this also occurred in adults. He was joined by William Dement, a medical student at that time. They started the first electrical measurement of eyeball movement during sleep. They attached electrodes to the skin at the corners of the eyeballs to pick up potential changes when the eyeballs moved. This kind of eye movement recording is called an electro-oculogram or EOG. Dr William Dement is now the director of the Sleep Disorder Centre at Stanford University, California, and also the Professor of Psychiatry in its medical school. He remains a world authority on sleep.
Kleitman and Dement observed that, when a person is sleeping, there is rapid eye movement in both eyes and this recurs periodically about four to five times each night. If these people are awakened during one of these periods of rapid eye movement, 95 per cent report that they are dreaming, compared with 7 per cent at other times of awakening. The duration of the dreams they recall appear to correlate with the length of the period of the rapid eye movement. This rapid eye movement sleep is now abbreviated to REM sleep. REM is pronounced like the word 'gem'.
During REM sleep, the person is dreaming, his mind is active, and his eyes are moving rapidly back and forth under closed eyelids. The EEG recording is very similar to that of the awake state, like a very irregular saw tooth, and nothing like that of the four stages of sleep described previously. Contrary to what we expect, when the person is dreaming his body is not moving at all, but is in complete relaxation—paralysed. Some people call this REM sleep the paradoxical sleep. This is because the mind is active and dreaming, but, paradoxically, the body is totally inactive and motionless. It is thought that this complete body rest during REM sleep is essential for the refreshing feeling the person feels in the morning. This is because no matter how tense a person is, during REM sleep his muscles are all relaxed It is also thought that this complete body paralysis during dreaming prevents the dreamer from acting out his dream physically when he is asleep. It looks like there is some form of jamming mechanism that disconnects the brain activity from the muscular system of the body.
Michael Long, in a 1985 edition of National Geographic, reported that, in Minneapolis, at the Hennepin County Medical Centre, a Dr Mahowald and a Dr Schenck interviewed over 30 people who somehow bypassed this jamming mechanism during REM sleep and acted out their dreams. This is of course extremely dangerous, but fortunately also extremely rare. During dreaming all sorts of fantasies, angers, and frustrations are acted out. Those people with no jamming mechanism can endanger not only themselves but also those sleeping beside them. It was reported that some of these violent dreamers beat their wives up repeatedly, smashed windows, punched holes in the walls, and displayed remarkable strength and agility. Fortunately most of us have this jamming mechanism which prevents us from acting out our dreams; otherwise our beds would look very different, with restraining belts to lock our bodies and limbs to the bed, to prevent us from running wild destroying things in the house when we are having a nightmare.
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