Sleep and Emotions

Ninety-five percent of adult Americans average seven to eight hours a night. The rest seem to need more than nine hours, or get along nicely on less than six. What distinguishes the long and short sleepers from the majority?

To get some answers, Psychiatrist Er nest L. Hartmann, 36, advertised in Bos ton and New York papers for long and short sleepers to engage in an eight-night "sleep-in" at Boston State Hos pital's Sleep and Dream Laboratory, which Hartmann directs. His findings in dicate that such people differ from or dinary sleepers -- and each other -- not so much physically as psychologically.

For them, sleep serves vary ing, sometimes surprising purposes.

Testing showed significant psychological differences be tween long and short sleep ers. The shorts tended to be conformist and emo tionally stable: "a successful and relatively healthy bunch with very little overt psy-chopathology," says Hart mann. "Their entire life style involved keeping busy and avoiding psychological problems rather than facing them." They also awakened seldom during the night and arose in the morning refreshed and ready to go.

Long sleepers, in contrast, checked out as nonconform ist, shy, somewhat with drawn, and melancholy. Reports Hartmann: "Almost all showed evidence of some in hibition in the spheres of sexual or aggressive functioning." Some betrayed "mild anxiety neuroses" and depression. Moreover, they slept fitfully, waked often and typically got up with a mild case of the morning blahs.

At first Hartmann was tempted to clas sify the restless long sleepers as "well-compensated insomniacs" who had to spend more hours in bed simply to get enough sleep. He changed his mind with the discovery that long, short and average sleepers all spend about the same amount of time in what research ers call "slow-wave sleep," the deep and relatively dreamless state, totaling some 75 minutes a night, when people are presumed to get their real recu peration from the activities of the pre vious day. Additionally, Hartmann concluded that long sleepers spent nearly twice as much of the night as others in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep -- a state in which the sleeper's brain is as active as in full consciousness.

REM sleep is dream sleep. In ad dition to the long sleeper's measurably greater need to dream -- that is, to mull over the problems of wakeful life--Psychiatrist Hartmann proposes another function of sleep. Since the long sleeper shows more symptoms of emotional problems than the short sleeper, who resolutely avoids his problems anyway, it seems that he may use his hours in bed to give his subconscious sleeping self more time to examine these problems and, if possible, to work them out.

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