"To Sleep ... to Dream"

Everybody knows that he needs sleep, up to about eight hours a night, but not until last week did hardheaded medical scientists report that dreaming is even more essential to health than sleeping. Everybody needs an average of about 1 1/2 dreaming hours, usually spread over six or seven dreams during a night's sleep.

These findings were reported to the American Psychiatric Association at a long evening meeting, before a surprisingly wide-awake audience, by Dr. William Dement, 31, a research fellow in psychiatry at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital. While a member of Physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman's research team at the University of Chicago, Dr. Dement had helped to settle an age-old question: Is dreaming continuous during sleep? The answer is no: it is intermittent. The beginning of a dream is signaled by brainwave changes shown on the electroencephalogram and by rapid eye movements.

The importance of dreams became evident. Dr. Dement now reports, when the researchers reversed their techniques to keep their volunteer subjects from dreaming. Instead of waking them at the end of an E.E.G. dream-pattern period (which averages about 20 minutes), they aroused them at the beginning. Through the night, these dream-deprived subjects got as much sleep as the previous group. But during successive dreamless nights they tried to dream oftener, up to 30 times on the fifth night. In contrast to the control subjects, who were wakened only after dreaming, this group became irritable and upset during waking hours. Their reactions resembled those of Disk Jockey Peter Tripp during his 200-hour sleep-deprivation marathon (TIME, Feb. 9, 1959): at first easily upset, he began hallucinating on about the fourth sleepless day.

The only plausible inference, said Dr. Dement, is that sleep deprivation may not be the direct cause of such hallucinations. Dreams and hallucinations are notoriously similar. It is possible that the human organism must have one or the other to release unconscious emotional tensions. Deprived of dreaming, even when it gets "enough sleep," the system may turn to hallucinations as a substitute. Concluded Dr. Dement: "We believe that if anybody were deprived of dreams long enough, it might result in some sort of catastrophic breakdown."

By this reasoning, Shakespeare understated the case with "To sleep: perchance to dream." Mayhap there is no "perchance." And Freud may have been conservative when he called dreams "the guardian of sleep." By Dr. Dement's data, they are the guardian of sanity.

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