Why do we move our eyes when we dream during REM sleep? Initially it was thought that, when we dream, we are looking at the dream while we are asleep. Considerable research was conducted in an attempt to support this theory. Ian Oswald, the sleep expert at Edinburgh, attempted to distinguish the kind of dreams his subjects had by observing the rapidity of the eye movements and the direction of the last eye movement just before they were awoken from their dreams. He questioned the dreamer after he had woken up about the last event in the dream. He then tried to correlate the direction of the last movement of the eyes with the direction of the last event in the dream.
Later he tried to distinguish two kinds of dream, the active and the passive. He postulated that, in an active dream, such as watching a game of tennis on a tennis court, the eyes would have to be moving from side to side intensely, whereas, in a passive dream, such as watching tennis on television, the eyes would not be moving much at all. With this in mind, he questioned the dreamers about their dreams and tried to correlate the dreams with the amount of their eye movement Oswald found there was a close relationship between the dream contents and the amount of eye movement.
Oswald conducted another study to find out if blind people display rapid eye movement His theory was that blind people who had been blind all their lives would not be able to look at their dreams, as they would not have any experience of moving their eyes to look at the world. He obtained an EOG recording from three blind people while they were sleeping but could not trace any REM sleep in them. He thought this confirmed his theory that dreamers were looking at their dreams and blind dreamers could not look at their dreams and hence had no REM sleep. This was proved to be wrong, as it was later learned that the electrodes used by Oswald were not sensitive enough and could not record eye movement in blind people whose eyes had defective retinas.
Charles Fisher, a psychiatrist in New York, repeated the same experiments with blind people, but used more sensitive devices to record the movements of the eyelids. He demonstrated rapid eye movements in these blind people just like in everyone else. Blind people, during REM sleep, have dreams which are very much based on their everyday experiences. They consist of touch, smell, sound, and images that they are used to when asleep.
Nowadays it is believed that rapid eye movements have nothing to do with looking at dreams, but rather are signs of brain activity. Profuse eye movement means a high level of brain activity which implies very active dreams. Our eyes are in fact part of our brain and are placed immediately below the front part of the brain. The eye movements are controlled by small muscles around the eyeballs, which are in turn activated by nerves that originate in the midbrain. The mid-brain is now considered the seat of the sleep centre which initiates and controls sleep. Hence by looking at the movements of the eyes while dreaming, we are really looking at the activities of the brain and the sleep centre itself. Dreams that are peaceful and calm will have less rapid eye movements, whereas dreams that are very active and emotional will have a great deal of eye movements. Much research is now going on to determine whether there is a REM sleep centre outside the normal sleep centre. The REM sleep centre will initiate dreams and its associated phenomena.
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