THE PARADOX OF SLEEP

THE PARADOX OF SLEEP
The Story of Dreaming
Michel Jouvet
Translated by Laurence Garey
Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1999
211 pages, hardback, $25
ISBN 0-262-10080-0

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

This book is an updated series of essays written over the past two decades. The author, one of the world's foremost researchers in sleep and dreams, discovered in the late 1950s that our most intense dreaming occurs in a state he dubbed paradoxical sleep. The paradox is that our brains are as active as when we are awake, perhaps even more so, while our bodies lie nearly paralyzed. Our eyes are busy, however, darting to and fro beneath closed lids, giving this state its name, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep.

Dreaming, Jouvet found, is as different from sleep as sleep is from waking. The concept of three states of existence was familiar to ancient societies, Jouvet says, and persists in some modern cultural practices. The fellahs of the Nile delta, he relates, wrap the head with a turban to keep the soul from escaping while they sleep, and the Masai of Kenya wake sleepers slowly, to allow their wandering spirits time to return to their bodies.

In this book, Jouvet reviews the history of modern dream research, taking readers into the laboratory to explain how studies are conducted. Non-scientist readers will find the technical details tough-going, but still should come away with enhanced understanding of the research process and better understanding of some key findings.

It's interesting to hear this distinguished researcher's opinions on continuing controversies such as whether we dream all night, or only in REM sleep. Some sleep specialists believe that mental activity persists throughout sleep, but Jouvet is not among them. It's true that waking people outside of REM sleep sometimes elicits reports of mental activity, he notes. These thoughts as a rule are fairly mundane and not the fanciful tales we think of as dreams. Such thoughts may be faded remnants of previous paradoxical sleep episodes, Jouvet suggests, or of the brief hallucinatory experiences that sometimes occur while falling asleep.

No dream book would be complete without a theory of why we dream. Jouvet contrasts Freud's theories with those of contemporary researchers, and offers his own. Dreaming sleep, he suggests, helps us preserve our individuality. It provides periodic opportunities to rerun a built-in genetic program, insuring that we stay who we are, despite influences from the world around us. It's not necessary for us to remember dreams, he says, for this process to take place.

Despite all we now know about the 'how' of dreams, Jouvet concedes, we remain uncertain about the 'why.' This problem, he suggests, probably is "the greatest enigma that the dreaming brain offers to the waking brain."