The Destitute Graduate Student Who Discovered Dreaming

The Mechanism

Eugene Aserinsky was born in Brooklyn in 1921, the son of a Russian-Jewish dentist. He was an indifferent student. He tried dentistry at Maryland and dropped out. He tried social work at Penn and dropped out. He enlisted in the Army Signal Corps in 1942 and served as a high-explosives instructor and radio operator in the Pacific. After the war, on the GI Bill, he went back to school and tried to apply to graduate programs in physiology. He was rejected by every program he applied to except one: the University of Chicago, the program of Nathaniel Kleitman, the world's leading expert on sleep.

Kleitman's laboratory was idiosyncratic, underfunded, and considered marginal by most neuroscientists. Aserinsky later said it was the only choice he had. He arrived in Chicago in 1949 with his wife Sylvia and an infant son. His graduate stipend was $44 a month. Their rent was $35 a month. They lived in a converted garage, and the family ate mostly oatmeal.

For his thesis project, Kleitman gave Aserinsky an obscure problem. A German researcher in 1923 had reported that adults sometimes showed slow, rolling eye movements at the moment they fell asleep. Did the same thing happen in infants? Could the rolling movements be used to measure how deeply a person was sleeping? Aserinsky was supposed to find out. He could not get any infant subjects to study. Parents refused. So he used, instead, his own eight-year-old son, Armond.

He borrowed an old polygraph machine from the basement storeroom of the Department of Physiology - a bulky, electromechanical instrument called the Offner Type R Dynograph, with eight inked pens that scratched across a slowly-rolling drum of brown paper recording tape. He attached small electrodes to the corners of his son's eyes and to his son's scalp. The boy lay down on a cot in the basement room and went to sleep. The pens scratched out flat baselines. Night after night, all night.

The decisive night was December 9, 1952. About 90 minutes after Armond had fallen asleep, the pens erupted. The eye-movement pens slammed back and forth in a fast, jagged pattern. At the same time, the brainwave pens jumped from the slow steady rhythm of deep sleep to a fast, irregular pattern indistinguishable from the brainwaves of a person who is wide awake. Aserinsky thought, at first, that his son had woken up and was reading a book in the dark. He grabbed a flashlight and ran into the room. The boy was sound asleep. His eyes were moving rapidly underneath his closed eyelids. He could not be roused without shaking. When the boy finally woke up, he reported a vivid dream.

The pattern repeated again about 90 minutes later, and again 90 minutes after that. Aserinsky recruited more subjects - other adults from the laboratory. Every adult had it. Every adult had it in cycles of roughly 90 minutes. Every adult, when woken during one of those cycles, reported having been dreaming. The pattern was named "rapid eye movement sleep," or REM sleep.

The paper - Aserinsky and Kleitman, "Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena, during sleep" - appeared in Science on September 4, 1953. It is one and a half pages long. Until that paper, every doctor and every psychologist had assumed for thousands of years that sleep was simply the slow, quiet "off" state of consciousness. The paper showed that sleep is in fact two completely different physiological states that take turns, all night long: a quiet deep state (now called NREM, or slow-wave sleep) and an active state (REM) in which the brain looks awake, the body's voluntary muscles are mostly paralyzed, and the sleeper is dreaming.

Almost everything modern medicine knows about sleep follows from that single observation: the discovery of narcolepsy with cataplexy, REM-sleep behavior disorder, the role of REM in memory consolidation, the role of REM in emotional regulation, and the eighty-four discrete sleep disorders catalogued today. Aserinsky himself did not benefit. He left Chicago in 1953 for a series of low-paying positions at small colleges. He never had a major research program of his own. He never trained graduate students. The senior credit for sleep medicine passed to his supervisor Nathaniel Kleitman and to William Dement, a Chicago medical student who joined the laboratory in 1952 and is now widely called "the father of sleep medicine." Aserinsky is a footnote in the field he founded.

He died on July 22, 1998, age 77, when his car drifted off a country road outside Carlsbad, California, and into a roadside tree. The coroner could not determine the cause. The family suspected that the man who had discovered REM sleep had, finally, fallen asleep at the wheel.