The Promise of Sleep by William C. Dement

ĭement, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, taught the large and popular “Sleep and Dreams” course at Stanford, which started in 1971. Christian Guilleminault, Dement proposed the measure that is still used for the clinical definition of sleep apnea and the rating of its severity, the Apnea Hypopnea Index (AHI). He was among the first researchers to study sleeping subjects with the electroencephalogram (EEG), and he wrote “I believe that the study of sleep became a true scientific field in 1953, when I finally was able to make all-night, continuous recordings of brain and eye activity during sleep.” Studying these recordings, he discovered and named the five stages of sleep. In 1964, he monitored and assisted Randy Gardner‘s successful attempt to break the record for longest time without sleep. He began his work in sleep deprivation at Mount Sinai Hospital in the late 1950s – the early 1960s. Dement had an interest in psychiatry, which in those days considered dreams to be important, so he was excited by the discovery and was eager to pursue it. Aserinsky, along with his and Dement’s adviser Nathaniel Kleitman, had previously noticed the connection but hadn’t considered it very interesting. Kleitman and I think these eye movements might be related to dreaming”. His fellow student Eugene Aserinsky had mentioned to him that “Dr.

In the 1950s, of those who also studied at the University of Chicago he was the first to intensively study the connection between rapid eye movement and dreaming. For this pioneering work in a previously uncharted field in the United States, he is sometimes referred to as the American father of sleep medicine.ĭement was born in Wenatchee, Washington in 1928. He was a leading authority on sleep, sleep deprivation and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy.

William Charles Dement (J– June 17, 2020) was an American sleep researcher and founder of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University.

The Promise of Sleep by William C. Dement