‘Sleep is like love. If you have it, you take it for granted,’ reports Wendy Cooper in the Observer Magazine on 24 January 1971. If you don’t, it’s rhythmic rocking or counting sheep for you, though not for Charles Dickens: he made sure his bed faced north, better to boost his creativity as he slumbered.
We spend a third of our lives sleeping, but some feel they still don’t get enough, some (narcoleptics) fall asleep when they eat. Some sleepwalk or, in one case, sleepride their motorbike in the middle of the night.
Insomnia, one of the most common complaints to doctors, sees pharmaceutical companies researching ‘new sleep-inducing drugs’. In special sleep laboratories throughout the world, the ‘secrets of the strange phenomenon of sleep are being properly investigated for the first time,’ enthuses Cooper. They are armed with a new wonder machine: the electro-encephalograph (EEG), which detects the minute electrical changes taking place in the brain, amplifying and recording them.
Researchers in the control room watch their sleeping volunteers, and the charts. The real excitement starts, says Cooper, when ‘the eyes make rapid jerky coordinated movements… This indicates a special form of sleep known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep; the brainwaves at these times resemble waking brainwaves and the body parallels this with a storm of activity’. Irregular heart-rate, increased oxygen intake, reduced muscle tone, It’s all preparation for action in the sleeper’s ‘personal world of dreams’, dreams that are vivid, ‘emotional, self-involved and often bizarre adventures’.
This association between REM sleep and active dreaming is ‘perhaps the most exciting discovery so far made in sleep research’ – for ‘it makes possible the scientific study of dreams’. Eyes are already wide open at current findings, such as the fact that dreams don’t happen in a flash: ‘The time taken for a dream roughly matches the time that would be needed for the same actions in waking life.’ Sounds exhausting.
REM sleep, it turns out, is the key to wellbeing – the brain gets ‘offline’ time to revise and classify information. Without it, there is a significant deterioration in judgment, speed and accuracy. Shift workers, take note.
