A Visit to a Sleep and Dreams Lab
I f you were asked to determine i f someone is asleep, what would you look for? You
probably would check the person’s eyes to see i f they were closed, see i f the person
were relaxed and still, be sure they are not very responsive to stimuli, were breathing
regularly, and so on. But you, like just about everyone, have at one time or another
done all o f these things to fool other people into believing you were asleep. Then, too,
someone in a coma shows all o f these signs, appearing to be asleep. I t i s apparent that
you cannot tell very accurately i f a person is asleep simply by observation.
Alternatively, you could wake the person up and ask i f they were asleep, but you then
depend on that person’s ability to willingly and accurately tell you and, o f course, the
person i s then no longer asleep. I t is rather like the joke my father used to tell: “Says
one Englishman to another, ‘Were you in the boat when the boat tipped over!’ ‘ N o ,
you blithering idiot, I was in the water!’”
There are two important implications o f this inability to observe whether or not
another person is asleep. First, until the middle o f the twentieth century, there was little
scientific study o f sleep. Thus, much o f what is known about sleep is new knowledge,
and some o f it is surprising, since it is contrary to popular beliefs. Second, most
study o f sleep has taken place in a sleep lab where lie sleeper is attached to sensitive
instruments allowing objective determination o f sleep without disturbing i t .
(Although the development o f miniaturized portable equipment has allowed increasingly
more sleep research to be conducted outside the lab.) Sleep labs have only been in
existence since 1951 when Aserinsky and Kleitman first reported that sleeping people
have two different kinds o f sleep. Today, there are many sleep labs all over the world engaged in exploring the mysteries of sleep every night. Let me first take you on a visit
to a sleep lab before we discuss what is known about basic sleep processes.