Dr. Matt Walker

But in the 60s then, William Dement, knowing that there were these two types of sleep and knowing that there was something that was going on with REM sleep where people were dreaming and he would be waking people up from these different stages and found that it's far more likely for people to report a dream.

He wondered what the consequence would be if you selectively deprive people of this stage of sleep, of dream sleep.

So he brought individuals into his laboratory.

And every time they would go into REM sleep, they would go into the room, they would wake them up, have them do some mathematical problems for two or three minutes, and then put them back asleep.

And they go back into non-REM.

And then as soon as they went back into REM...

They would wake them up again.

And the first night, they would have to go into the room maybe six or seven times.

Still brutal for the person in the experiment.

Not too much fun.

But by the end of the five days or six days, I think they were going back into the room something like 17, 18 times.

Why?

Because the people were...

building up this growing REM sleep debt.

And the brain had such a hunger for it that by night five of no REM sleep, all it wanted to do was rocket into this thing called REM sleep and start devouring it with high volume.

But that wasn't the interesting part.

The interesting part was the consequence to these subjects.

They were all well-adjusted, perfectly normal individuals.

By about day three of selective REM sleep deprivation, they started to show signs of paranoia.

They started to believe people were out after them.