Snores and the Self

By Eric Hal Schwartz | Photos by Jane K. Fox

It’s bedtime for Dafna.* Getting ready for bed tonight takes longer than it normally does for this Boston University freshman. After Dafna changes into her pajamas, technician Sylvester Umudi walks into the bedroom, which is actually a hospital room—complete with wall-mounted television, extra bed and sterile environment. Umudi places electrodes all over Dafna’s body to measure everything from her heart rate to the twitches of her eyes and legs.

Even though Dafna says being wired up is at first uncomfortable, the smooth tones of the TV help her eventually drift into sleep. A few hours later she is startled awake by Umudi asking her to talk into a tape recorder about her dreams, how she is feeling and other subjects. Then Dafna is allowed to go back to sleep. But after barely an hour she is awakened again to answer subtly different questions. Finally, morning comes. Yawning, Dafna changes, packs up her things and walks out into the new day.

Dozens of people participate in sleep studies at the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory (ENL) at Boston University. Dafna is taking part in the REM/non-REM processing specializations study, in which researchers observe and analyze how people feel about themselves during different stages of sleep. The hypothesis is that during REM sleep negative thoughts, memories and emotions are processed, creating a temporarily negative self-view that may have implications for a person’s state of mind while awake.

“The goal is to use numbers and statistics to find the purpose of REM sleep,” said Patricia Johnson, a research assistant for the experiment. An avid proponent of trying to understand how sleep affects the ways people think and act, Johnson has been working in the lab since before she graduated from BU last spring.

She is not alone in her enthusiasm. “Nobody understands the function of sleep,” said laboratory supervisor Erica Harris, who arranges and plans details of ENL experiments in conjunction with director Patrick McNamara. Harris has worked at the lab for several years as she pursues her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience. She currently oversees several experiments, all of which involve sleep studies of some sort. Past ENL studies have included the role and functions of mammalian sleep.

Deep within the Boston University Medical Center, only a short distance from the sick and injured, the ENL currently hosts up to three students in the plain but comfortable rooms reserved for study participants. “Last night I watched Elf,” Dafna said. “It was fun.”

Sleep is a complex and many-layered event. In 1952, scientists defined the stages of the sleep cycle that humans and many animals go through. The four stages are rapid eye movement (REM) and three different phases of non-rapid eye movement (NREM). In human beings, the brain cycles through these stages of sleep approximately every hundred minutes, with about twenty-five minutes in REM sleep. Most dreaming occurs during the REM state. “The brain gets highly activated, more so than when awake,” McNamara said.

When consciousness slips away, the brain goes through the three stages of NREM sleep. After the third stage, the body surfaces briefly to stage two again before falling into the REM state, which is deeper than any of the other three phases. During REM sleep, the brain “sparks,” ceasing to give off the relatively placid alpha and delta brain waves associated with NREM states. Based purely on brain-wave patterns, an observer might assume the sleeper is actually conscious. The heartbeat and body temperature change erratically, and the portions of the brain dealing with sensory input are active and functioning at a level even greater than those of a conscious person—that is, more than can be explained by actual external stimuli.

This is the crux of the fascination McNamara, Harris and others in the sleep lab have with the work they are doing, particularly as it pertains to implications regarding a person’s emotional state. “Sleep may be a way to view the true self-image,” Harris said. In examining this self-image, researchers hope to gain insight into how people really feel about themselves.

The study begins even before the participants come into the lab for their first night. Dafna spent four nights in preparation. “They gave me a big packet to do, and I had to fill out a sleep diary,” she said. The data provided by subjects like Dafna are essential for the study, Harris said, in part because the more data the researchers have the better the study, and in part because the preexperiment data aid in corroborating the questions researchers ask.

On her first night in the lab, Dafna was hooked up to the many measuring devices but not awakened at all. This “habituation night” calibrates the machines to the way the participants sleep and ensures there won’t be any issues with them sleeping in the lab. “I make sure they don’t pull the wires off,” Umudi said. Dafna said one of her favorite parts of participating in the study was the opportunity to see the data she generates. The researchers printed out an EEG of her brain waves, so she could see what happens while she sleeps.

The next night researchers set up the experiment the same way except that twice during the night Dafna was awakened, once during REM sleep and once during stage two of non-REM sleep. To determine what is going on in their subjects’ heads while they sleep, the researchers use a process that is hardly esoteric, Harris said. “We do it the old-fashioned way—wake them up and ask ‘Hey! What were you dreaming about?’” The answers to the questions are recorded, along with all the data from the machine hookups. “We ask what they were dreaming, how they are feeling and how they view themselves.” Different tests, including completing word stems and describing people and memories evoked by a word, are conducted. The dreams the participants describe are also scored on the Hall/Van de Castle system—a way of measuring events and objects in a dream—and analyzed for linguistic content, thematic elements and other characteristics.

“It gives an intimate look at the mind,” Harris said.

Indeed, the results that are coming in are both intriguing and somewhat paradoxical. “When we wake [study subjects] up during REM sleep, they apply less positive and more negative adjectives to themselves,” McNamara said.

The dreams described by the participants reflect those negative feelings. In REM sleep, dreams are more likely to involve conflict, arguments, even violence. By contrast, NREM dreams feature calmer encounters and no violence at all. Interestingly, despite the negativity associated with REM sleep, it is during REM that the body shows signs of physical arousal and most sexual dreams occur.

So far, the researchers have not uncovered a direct correlation between the REM self-image and self-image while awake. It is not, for instance, that people with violent dreams are necessarily violent, but they see themselves that way while in REM sleep. “It’s their view of themselves,” Harris said.

The effect on people when they are awake is subtle but very real. “People with too much REM sleep get depressed,” McNamara said. Essentially, when people sleep, the protective, civilized layer that informs how they think and act drops away, and during REM sleep, people are harsh and negative in their views of the world and themselves, she said. As a result, too much time spent in that state can make people depressed when awake, even if they may not understand why.

Other scientists have pondered the relationship between a sleeping and an awake mind, but the ENL study is the first to focus on the idea that the very self that people define as “I” is laid bare during sleep and that its expression may depend on the stage of sleep. Yet even with all the research on REM sleep, its role remains very much a question mark. “There have been literally thousands of studies, but no one knows what its function is,” McNamara said.

He added that REM sleep may actually aid in stabilizing memory and in keeping the mind flexible even as it casts a pall on a person’s emotions. “It’s important to remember how peculiar it is,” he said, “and how little we still know.”

Johnson believes it’s all about balance. REM sleep is necessary, but like most things in life, too much is harmful, she said.

This particular ENL study continued through January, with some sixty participants, Harris said. For Dafna, who learned about the study from a previous participant and roped her roommate into taking part, the experience was a positive one. “It’s really interesting to be a part of it,” she said.

McNamara believes it will be a long time before REM sleep and the inner workings of the mind are understood. Even as data come in, more questions—on subjects such as the physical purpose of sleep, the purpose of having a negative self-image while sleeping and the proper proportions of different sleep stages—will arise. “The whole thing is a deep, abiding mystery,” he said.

* Last name withheld

© Copyright | The Graduate Student Magazine of Boston University's College of Communication