The importance of dreams

In 1960, an American psychiatrist named William Dement published experiments dealing with the recording of eye-movements during sleep. He showed that the average individual’s sleep cycle is punctuated with peculiar bursts of eye- movement, some drifting and slow, others jerky and rapid. People woken during these periods of eye-movement generally reported that they had been dreaming. When woken at other times they reported no dreams. If one group of people were disturbed from their eye-movement sleep for several nights on end, and another group were disturbed for an equal period of time but when they were not exhibiting eye-movements, the first group began to show some personality disorders, while the others seemed more or less unaffected. The implications of all this were that it was not the disturbance of sleep that mattered but the disturbance of dreaming.