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The MIT Press
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Jouvet tells the story of a handful of neurobiologists, including himself, who pioneered sleep and dream research in the 1950s. He describes the technical and ideological obstacles they faced and opens his own laboratory to the reader. A key section of the book is Jouvet's discussion of why we dream. After summarizing Freud's theory of dreams, he contrasts it with current neurobiological data. Finally he outlines his own controversial theory about why we dream: to preserve our individuality.
When an author begins a book with words like these, the reader is allowed to expect a lot. Fortunately, Michel Jouvet delivers with The Paradox of Sleep, a rare synthesis of poetry and hard science covering one of the most bizarre and inexplicable aspects of human experience, the dream. While 20 percent of us don't remember them, it's a safe bet that all of us fly, take tests, or show up at parties in our underwear every night while fast asleep, and neuroscience has only recently caught up with other scientific efforts to explain why. Jouvet was a pioneer who discovered that "paradoxical sleep"--what the rest of us call the REM, or "rapid eye movement" phase--is in fact as different from dreamless sleep as the latter is from waking. This collection of essays, seamlessly woven into a narrative whole, explains the differences between sleep states, discusses relevant animal and human research, explores the meaning of our dreams within the context of our scientific knowledge, and speculates on the evolutionary function of dreaming. Jouvet's prose reaches further than just listing interesting facts and consistently bridges the gap between our 20th-century knowledge and our medieval sense of wonder. How can a modern scientist get away with integrating deep spiritual questions with precise analysis of experimental data? It's a tough question, but one that we can hope more scientists begin asking themselves after reading The Paradox of Sleep. --Rob Lightner