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A short history of sleep science

This page is kept for completeness. It describes research conducted before the Quieting, when dreaming was still considered a normal part of sleep.

1953 — the discovery of rapid eye movement

On 1953-09-04 the journal Science published a two-page note by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman describing periods of rapid, jerky eye movements during sleep, accompanied by changes in brain activity. Sleepers woken during these periods reported vivid dreams. It was the first physiological evidence that dreaming has a time, a rhythm, and a signature.

The tree at Konkoly

A footnote in the archive record refers to a night observation made at the Konkoly observatory: an astronomer, asleep at the eyepiece, woke and drew a tree he insisted he had seen standing in a square of a city under rain. The drawing survives. The city did not, then, exist.

"The source remembers what the page forgot."
— marginal annotation, recovered

After the Quieting

REM periods still occur. Recall does not. Whether the two facts are connected is outside the remit of this service.

3 Footnote withdrawn in the second printing. Catalogue reference QT-8803. Register a mark.

Order of the record, for those who keep it: discoverer · date · observatory · what he drew. Lowercase. Separated by the vertical bar.

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