May/1998
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THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF SLEEP Peretz Lavie (Translated by Anthony Berris. Yale University Press, 1996, 270 pages, hardcover, $27.50)
Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg
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In his introduction, Lavie states his intention "to describe the
incredible evolution of a new area of scientific inquiry, to which I was
a privileged eyewitness." This he does admirably, offering the rich
detail of 30 years as participant-observer in a field generally
conceded to be a sleepy science until the discovery in the early
1950s that the brain often is as active in sleep as in wakefulness.
Unlike many who write autobiographies, Lavie, now dean of
the faculty of medicine and head of the sleep laboratory at the
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, generously
acknowledges mentors and colleagues, offering insight into the
collaborative process that spurs scientific advances.
During the Gulf War, he relates, 38 of the 39 Scud missile
attacks on Israel occurred in the evening or at night. Fearing they
would not hear the siren alerting them to an imminent attack, many
people had trouble falling asleep. This problem diminished after
Israel Radio, at the behest of psychiatrist Ehud Klein and Lavie,
instituted a "silent channel" that broadcast only in the event of an
attack. Surveys showed that more than half of the country's
population went to bed with the radio tuned to this channel for the
rest of the war.
Lavie also recorded sleep in both subjects' homes and his
laboratory during the war, finding that despite having increased
anxiety at bedtime, most people slept as well as usual. In one
instance, 10 subjects were having their sleep monitored in his
lab on nights that attacks took place. The technicians woke the
subjects, helped them put on gas masks, led them to a sealed
room until the all clear siren sounded, and then returned them to
bed. The longest anyone took to fall back to sleep was only 12
minutes.
In another study, Lavie and researcher Hanna Kaminer found
that well-adjusted Holocaust survivors managed to banish memories
of their wartime experiences even from their dreams. Sleepers
awakened from dreaming sleep in the sleep laboratory normally
recall dreams about 80 percent of the time. The well-adjusted
survivors, however, did so only about a third of the time. Survivors
who had problems with work, family life, and health slept more fitfully
and often dreamed they were in danger or even back in the
concentration camp.
Lavie's book includes photographs of noted sleep
researchers along with illustrations of sleep cycles and sleep
records. It also includes 15 pages of references and an index.
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