William H. Moorcroft
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Book Details
Price
|
3.00 |
|---|---|
Pages
| 372 p |
File Size
|
3,951 KB |
File Type
|
PDF format |
ISBN
| 978-1-4614-6466-2 978-1-4614-6467-9 (eBook) |
Copyright©
| Springer Science? Business Media New York 2005, 2013 |
I am often asked about how I got interested in sleep and dreams.
I reply with a little story.
Everyone in the lab is going to the international sleep meeting in Europe. Why don’t you
come along? The round trip charter flight cost is only $180.00. The meeting lasts for
5 days but the flight does not return for another 25 days after that.
I heard this when I was doing postdoctoral research on the maturation of
brain waves in baby rats at the University of Nebraska Medical School shortly
after receiving a Ph.D. in psychology, actually psychobiology, from Princeton
University. I went. I admit that the main reason was to spend a month in
Europe. However, what I learned at the meeting, held in the summer of 1971,
fascinated me. It was the beginning of my continuing interest in sleep and all of
its ramifications.
Shortly after my return from Europe, I began to teach at Luther College and
found myself reading and lecturing frequently about sleep. Within a few years, my
research interests shifted away from baby rat brains to sleep. Soon I started a sleep
research laboratory at Luther College in which I have studied various aspects of
sleep and dreaming. I also kept on attending the meetings (some Europe, others in
places like Cape Cod and San Antonio) of what was to become the Sleep Research
Society. Later I attended the inaugural meeting of the Association for the Study of
Dreams (in San Francisco). In 1980, I learned about sleep disorders and did some
research in that area while on sabbatical at the Sleep Disorders Center headed by
Rozalind Cartwright of Rush Medical School in Chicago. My interest in dreaming
was piqued during this time since Dr. Cartwright had already done landmark
research in this area. Later, I was on another sabbatical at the Mayo Medical
Center’s Sleep Disorders Center in Rochester Minnesota. While at Mayo, I again
did some sleep disorders research.
Since my retirement from teaching and research I shifted into a clinical practice
of helping people with insomnia, bad dreams and nightmares, and young children
with sleep problems by changing thoughts and behaviors rather than by using
drugs. To date I have helped close to 500 people to sleep better.
W. H. Moorcroft, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming,
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-6467-9,
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
I love sleep and dreams, pun intended. I continue to study, lecture about, write
about, and treat sleep, dreaming, and sleep disorders. And of course, I have
continued to attend those wonderful meetings. My intention is to keep on keeping
on with these things as long as I am able to do so.
Foreword
The Art of Sleeping Well
Like everything else in life, sleeping has become more complicated.
Living used to be simple. People awoke from their sleep to face the day; they
worked, learned, ate, had fun, worried, rested, shared ideas or gossip, entertained
themselves, procreated and raised families, hunted, planted and harvested, got ill,
and got hurt or killed. Life was difficult but living was less complicated. Now,
particularly in industrialized nations people can select among many types of
lifestyles, careers, amusements, habits, goods, food, drink, clothes, and dwellings.
There is so much work to do each day that much of it is left to be done the
following day. People can choose how to live and how to end that life, but seeming
never having enough time to do anything, much less anything worth doing, in between.
Sleeping used to be simple as well. People fell asleep wherever and whenever
their weary bodies took them. They slept on cave floors softened by grass, leaves
or animal fur; on hammocks located high on treetops; or in wooden huts or
teepees. In their slumber, the unknown dangers of the darkened external world are
replaced by unknowable, sometimes equally dark and frightening, visions in their
dreams. In the morning, they rose with the sun.
Now, things are more complicated. The layperson is increasingly more
knowledgeable, and equally increasingly more misinformed, about sleep. Individuals
interested in learning more can easily access a multitude of resources, but
without knowing how to distinguish credible science from emerging science or
pseudoscience. Like everything else in love and life, the art of sleeping has been
commoditized and transformed into a marketable item that can be purchased or
practiced to satisfy an individual’s wants or needs, whether he wants or needs them or not.
It is time to return the acts of sleeping and waking into their proper settings—as
part of the daily rhythm of biological life, much like an ebb and flow, rise and fall,
or waning and waxing of physiologic processes that are essential to maintain the
balance necessary for health and living. It is time to allow falling asleep to be
‘‘natural’’ again. It is time to be familiar with scientific studies that help distinguish
what is fact or fiction about sleep, to provide a personalized approach to managing
persons with sleep-related complaints, and to have meaningful discussions with the
public regarding dysfunctional beliefs, irrational expectations, and unrealistic
concerns about sleep, sleep disorders and sleep loss. It is time for the science of
sleep and the art of clinical sleep medicine to be well known. This textbook,
Understanding Sleep and Dreaming, 2nd edition, is a good way to start.
Teofilo Lee-Chiong
Professor of Medicine
School of Medicine
National Jewish Health
University of Colorado Denver
Denver, CO, USA
Recipient of the American Association of Sleep Medicine Excellence in Education
Award 2012, Author/Editor of Sleep: A Comprehensive Handbook (2006) and
several sleep medicine textbooks.
Table of Contents
1 A Visit to a Sleep and Dreams Lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part I Sleep and Sleeping
2 What is Sleep and How it is Scientifically Measured . . . . . . . . . . 17
3 The Need to Sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4 Normal Variations of Sleep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Part II What Causes Us to Sleep?
5 The Brain in Sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
6 The Body During Sleep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Part III Dreams and Dreaming
7 Dreams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
8 Dreaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
9 Modern Theories of Dreams and Dreaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Part IV Why We Sleep and Dream
10 Functions of Sleep and NREMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
11 The Functions of REMS and Dreaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Part V Problems with Sleeping and Dreaming
12 Some Difficulties That People May Have with Sleep. . . . . . . . . . . 293
13 Disorders of Sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Bookscreen
Epilogue
As a way of summing up this book, I would like to present some of my views,
especially those on the functions of sleep. But first, I would like to invite you to
consider becoming a part of the exciting field of sleep and dreams.