User:Monicahuynh/Sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oneirology (from Greek oneiros, "dream"; and -λογία, -logia) the scientific study of dreams.
The first recorded use of the word was in 1653. An advocate of this discipline was the French sinologist Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys. The field gained momentum when Nathaniel Kleitman and his student Eugene Aserinsky discovered regular cycles. A further experiment by Kleitman and William C. Dement, then another medical student, demonstrated the particular period of sleep in which electrical brain activity as measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG) closely resembled that of waking as the eyes darted about actively. This kind of sleep became known as REM sleep, and Kleitman and Dement's experiment found a correlation of .80 between REM sleep and dreaming.
The independent and almost simultaneous confirmation of lucid dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Keith Hearne has allowed for many different types of further experiments and developments.
Current research seeks correlations in dreaming to current knowledge about the functions of the brain and how the understanding how the brain works during dreaming pertains to memory formation and mental disorders. The study of oneirology can be distinguished from dream analysis in that the aim is to quantitatively study the process of dreams instead of analyzing the meaning behind them.