Physiological Psychology - Dement & Kleitman (1957)

1. 1) Will people be more likely to report dreams during REM sleep or non-REM sleep?
2. 2) Can people accurately estimate the length of their dreams?
3. 3) Is the direction of eye movement related to dream context?

1. 7 males and 2 females.
2. 5 were studied in depth and minimal amount of data was collected for the other four, hoping that the four would confirm the findings of the first five.

Anmerkungen:

• The sleep laboratory would be a dark quiet room.

1. Participants had been asked to avoid drinking caffine and alcohol but otherwise eat and drink normally.

1. They were also meant to state how long they believe they had been dreaming, 5 minutes of fifteen.

1. Stage 1 - Lowered heart rate, muscle tension and body temperature. EEG shows brain activity with alpha waves that have 8-12 cycles per second (hertz). People cannot be easily woken from this stage.
   1. Stage 2 - Slower and larger EEG waves with sleep spindles. Bursts of high frequency waves (12-16 heartz) lasting for 1 second. People can be woken up relatively easiliy.
      1. Stage 3 - Sleep delta waves are seen as large slow waves of 1-3 heartz. People do not easiliy respond to external stimuli and are quite difficult to wake up.
         1. Stage 4 - Delta waves are around 1 hertz and is the deepest of the four stages of sleep. Metabolic rate is low and people are hard to wake up.

            Anmerkungen:

            • However, significant noises such as a baby crying will wake them up.
            1. REM Sleep - Appears around 30 minutes after Stage 4 and occurs for around 30 minutes before the cycle re-starts. EEG shows disyncronised pattern. Metabolic activity increases, as does heart rate, but the body is still more or less paralysed and is the hardest stage to wake from. Shows a similar pattern as if the subject was awake.

1. Gave an objective way to measure dreams.

Anmerkungen:

• It could be argued that dream recall was being tested rather than actual dreams. People might dream during non-REM sleep but are only able to recall it during REM sleep.

Anmerkungen:

• 9 participants were used in the study and only 5 of them were studied in detail.

Anmerkungen:

• The sleeping lab was an already alien enviroment to the paticipants, added to the fact they had electrodes attached to their heads whilst sleeping, the conditions in this study had a very low ecological validity.
• The participants were woken up constantly through the night with no specific timings to record theirs dreams and dream time estimations which was unlikely to happen in their every day sleeping lives.
• Caffine and alcohol were not to be consumed on the day of the study. Caffine could mean tea to coffee and redbull to coca cola. Drinks with caffine may have played a substantial part in a participants everyday life (their main fluid of consumption). In not being allowed to drink this they may not have drunk as much fluids as normal which could effect how they felt throughout the day and in turn how they slept which could have altered the results.

Anmerkungen:

• Promotes furthur research into sleep and dreaming.

Anmerkungen:

• Easy to collect and statistically analyse.
• Both quantitaive and qualitiative data was collected.

Anmerkungen:

• High controls over the variables within the laboratory experiment. - This made it easier to draw conclusions from the results. - And reduced the chance of confunding variables.

Anmerkungen:

• The EEG scan made it possible to know when to wake up a participant using the stages as a guide giving the study a scientific background which is seen as credible.

Anmerkungen:

• The equiptment used was precise and measured what was needed to be measured.

1. However, it allowed research into this area to be conducted in a scientific manner and the relationship between eye movement and dreaming to be established.