These may be our most elaborate, distinctive, revealing, and flamboyant creations. Dreams have fascinated minds since ancient times. The Egyptians built temples for dreaming. The oracles of Greece pondered dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious."(Papanek 15) Dreams allow us to glimpse beyond that which we are and know in daily life; they hint of other dimensions of space and time. People have often wondered what dreams really mean: why their minds tell them stories at night. Scientists have studied sleep and sleep patterns for years to find the answers to the mysteries of sleep, dreams, and the effects they have on ones life. With the discovery of REM Sleep, scientists have become one step closer to solving these puzzles. REM sleep, although not fully understood, is a crucial and necessary function of life.
At the University of Chicago in 1951, a student named Eugene Aserinsky was conducting experiments on wakefulness and sleep under Professor Nathaniel Kleitman. (Papanek 22) While studying sleeping infants, Aserinsky noticed that jerky motions of the eyes under closed lids frequently accompanied periodic body shifts. He decided to measure movements of the infants" eye muscles using a polygraph, generating a printout called an electrooculogram (EOG). To get a more complete picture of the physiological changes the were taking place, he also attached electrodes to his subjects" scalps and hooked these sensors up to an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measures the tiny electric currents rippling across the brain. Aserinsky noticed that when the subjects took afternoon naps, the eye-muscle sensors showed periodic bursts of movement. Instead of shifting to lower and lower states of activity during sleep, as one might expect, the infants" eyes eventually began twitching rapidly from side to side. Intrigued, Aserinsky and Kleitman conducted tests on adults and determined that people of all ages exhibit the same behavior.