At that moment Kleitman and Aserinsky realized the profound discovery they had made: humans don’t just sleep, but cycle through two completely different types of sleep. They named these sleep stages based on their defining ocular features: non–rapid eye movement, or NREM, sleep, and rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. Together with the assistance of another graduate student of Kleitman’s at the time, William Dement, Kleitman and Aserinsky further demonstrated that REM sleep, in which brain activity was almost identical to that when we are awake, was intimately connected to the experience we
...more
