Core study 2: Dement and Kleitman (Sleep and dreaming)

Background to the study

- The topics of sleep and dreaming are clearly hard to study because the participant is necessarily
asleep and so cannot communicate with the researcher. Even when the participants are awake,
only self-report data can be obtained about dream content, and these alone might not be
valid,as they are subjective.
- Now, with scientific intervention, sleep and dreaming can be studied with the intervention of
physiological techniques such as electro-encephalograph (EEG) to measure brain activity and
electro-oculogram (EOG) to record eye movement.

The psychology being investigated

Various studies have confirmed that sleep follows a cycle consisting of alternative periods of NREM
(with four stages) and REM, and that REM sleep is strongly associated with dreaming.

The reason for this study was to investigate further the features of REM sleep.

- NREM (non-rapid eye movement): is the rest of sleep period when the eyes do not move
rapidly. It is possible to break nREM sleep down into four stages (1 - 4), of which 1 is the lightest
and 4 the deepest.
- REM (rapid eye movement): is the sleep period when there is rapid eye movement under
closed lids. REM sleep resembles wakefulness in some ways: our eyes move, we often
experience vivid (if bizzare) thoughts in the form of dreams, and our brains are active.
- In other ways, it is different from wakefulness: we are quite difficult to wake up, we are fairly
insensitive to external stimuli, and we are paralysed.
- As REM sleep presents these contradictions, it is known as paradoxical sleep.

Aim

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between eye movements and dreaming.

The study had three hypotheses:

i) There will be a significant association between REM sleep and dreaming.

ii) There will be a significant positive correlation between the estimate of the duration of
dreams and the length of eye-movement.
iii) There will be a significant association between the pattern of eye movement and the context
of the dream.

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Method

This study was a laboratory experiment, with self-report method.

Aim 1: IV was REM and NREM sleep; DV was self-report of dream recall.

Aim 2: IV was length of REM; DV was self-report of dream length.

Aim 3: IV was direction of eye movement (vertical, horizontal, mixture, and little or no movement);
DV was self-report of dream content.

Participants were woken after particular patterns of REM. There were FOUR eye movement patterns
namely:

i) mainly vertical
ii) mainly horizontal
iii) both vertical & horizontal
iv) little or none

Controls: - all participants were asked to avoid caffeine or alcohol

- they were woken up by a bell
- dreams were recorded using a tape recorder

Design: all participants slept and were woken at various times, so the design could be said to

be repeated measures.

Sample and sampling technique

- 9 participants – seven males and 2 females

- 5 were studied in depth and the other 4 were used to confirm the results of the first five.

- The sample was self-selecting. Participants were volunteers who slept in the lab at the University
of Chicago (USA).

Procedure

- Participants studied in detail spent between 6 and 17 nights in the laboratory and were tested
with 50- 77 awakenings. The four participants used to confirm the findings stayed only one or
two nights and were awoken between four and ten times in total.
- Each participant was identifed by a pair of initials.

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- During the daytime prior to arrival at the laboratory, each participant was asked to eat normally
but to avoid drinks containing caffeine or alcohol.
- Participants arrived at the lab just before their normal bedtime and were fitted with electrical
recording apparatus. An EEG was used to measure participants’ brain waves and electrodes were
attached to the face and scalp. Two more electrodes were placed near the participants’ eyes to
record eye movement.
- Once participants were in bed, in a quiet and dark room, wires from the electrodes (which fed to
the EEG in the researcher’s room) were gathered into a ‘pony tail’ from the participant’s head, to
allow the person freedom of movement.
- The EEG ran continuously throughout the night to monitor the participant’s sleep stages and to
inform the researchers when participants should be woken up.
- Participant were woken up by a door bell that was loud enough to rouse them from any sleep
stage.
- The door-bell was rung at various times during the night and participants indicated whether they
had been dreaming prior to being woken up and, if so, described their dream in a voice recorder.
- They then returned to sleep (typically within five minutes).
- When the narrative was analysed, what was described to be a dream only if there was a
coherent, fairly detailed description of the content (i.e. vague, fragmentary impressions were
not scored as dreams).

NB: Three approaches were used to collect data from the individuals:

i) Information about dreams during rapid eye movement was obtained without any direct
contact between experimenters and the subjects by having the subject speak to a
recorder near the bed after being awakened by a loud door-bell.
ii) Participants were woken up either FIVE MINUTES or FIFTEEN MINUTES into a REM
period and asked to estimate whether they had been dreaming for five or fifteen
minutes
iii) The eye movements’ patterns (horizontal, vertical or mixed) were recorded in order to
relate them to the dream content that the subject would recall after being awakened.

Results

 Participants described dreams often when woken in REM but rarely from nREM sleep (although
there were individual differences).
- During REM sleep there were 152 dreams recalled compared to 11 dreams recalled in
NREM sleep.

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 - Specifically, participant WD was no less accurate despite being misled, and DN was no
more accurate even though he might have guessed the pattern of wakings.
 Dream duration (either 5 or 10 minutes) was correctly estimated by the participants.
- When woken after 5 minutes 45 out of 51 estimations were correct.
- When woken after 15 minutes 47 out of 60 estimations were correct.
 Pattern of eye movement corresponded to the content of the dream
i) Vertical movement: 3 dreams of vertical movements were seen:
- Participant dreamt standing at the bottom of a cliff operating a hoist and looking up
at the climbers and down at the hoist machinery
- Climbing up a series of ladders looking up and down as he climbed.
- Throwing basketballs at a net.
ii) Horizontal movement – only one instance seen where participant dreamt watching two
people throwing tomatoes at each other.
iii) Mixed movements –dreams were about people talking or watching objects close to them
them (e.g. talking to a group of people, looking for something, fighting with someone).
iv) Little or no eye movements - dreams involved the dreamer watching something at a distance
or just staring fixedly at some object.

Conclusions
 Dreams are more likely to occur in REM sleep.
 Dreams appear in ‘real time’.
 Dream content appears to correspond to the direction in which the eyes move.

Evaluation

Strengths

 The study contains a high amount of controls which makes the procedures standardised for
all and provide clear causal relationships e.g. no caffeine or alcohol, woken by a bell. If some
participants had woken more slowly they may have forgotten more of their dream. This was
avoided by using a loud doorbell that woke them instanly from any sleep stage.
 The participants were not told about their EEG pattern or whether their eyes were moving
in order to avoid demand characteristics, for example if they were expected to remember
more detailed dreams in REM sleep they may have made greater effort to do so.

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  EEG is also an objective way to investigate dreaming as it is a biological measure. It
therefore provides a very reliable measure because it is unaffected by experimenter’s
personal view.
 Both qualitative and quantitative data is provided in the results to provide and in-depth
account of REM sleep and dreaming. Quantitative counts of number of times dreams were
recalled, or dream length correctly estimated.  Qualitative records of dream content and
nature.  All from self-report.

Weaknesses

 The study has low ecological validity. The situation in which the participants had to sleep
(because the subjects had to sleep in an unfamiliar environment, wired with electrodes and
are restricted from taking alcohol or caffeine which they probably take before their bedtime)
was unusual and could have affected their sleep patterns. Also the nature of the method of
waking participants may have affected their ability to recall their dream.
 The sample is too small to make generalisations to larger groups of people as the sample
size was small and only included 2 females so we could argue that the results were biased
towards the dream pattern of men rather than women. Subsequent studies have found that
there are large differences between individuals in the reports of dreaming during REM.
 Self-report data:  how reliable is it when people are asked to recall their dreams? May they
be embarrassed or confused?  Will they tell the truth?
 Ethical issues raised. There was deception of participant WD who was misled about the
stage of sleep he was being woken in. Participants should be deceived as it can cause
distress and means they cannot give their informed consent. However in some cases the aim
Cannot be achieved without doing so.

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