Michel Jouvet
The Paradox of Sleep - The Story of Dreaming (1999) MIT Press, Cambridge
Translated from Jouvet M (1992)“Le Sommeil et le Rêve”, Odile Jacob, Paris
Second edition 2001: MIT Press, Cambridge
A proud native of the Franche-Comté of France, where he fought in the "maquis" during the second world war, Michel Jouvet is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and holds the Gold Medal of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). He is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Lyon, and was Director of the CNRS Unit for the Neurobiology of Vigilance and of the INSERM Unit for Molecular Oneirology.
He spent a year in the laboratory of Horace Magoun in California in 1955, where exciting new discoveries were being made concerning an area in the brain that controls arousal and wakefulness (the reticular formation). His work with Magoun inspired him to develop refined electrophysiological techniques to investigate states of vigilance and learning in the brain when he returned to France. It was while working on that project in Lyon in 1958 that he made a fortuitous discovery that he describes in the first chapter of his book, a discovery that changed his research goal, and his whole life. It led to his description in 1959 of paradoxical sleep, when the individual is neither asleep nor awake, but under the influence of a "new" third state of the brain. His work came soon after the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep by the group of neurophysiologists in Chicago comprising Nathaniel Kleitman, William Dement and Eugene Aserinsky, with whom he maintained close professional and amicable contacts.
Since then he has devoted himself to research on sleep and dreaming in his laboratories in Lyon. Although recently retired, he continues to work and to travel the world in pursuit of his goal of understanding how and why we dream. The team of students and disciples that he has formed over the years continues his everyday work and is delving into new realms.
The question of the relationship between REM sleep in man, paradoxical sleep in other animals, and dreaming in all, has remained a vexed one. Michel Jouvet has developed a number of theories about the function of dreaming rather than merely its mechanism ("why" as opposed to "how"). The most controversial of these theories is that dreaming may be an essential part of the maintenance of our individuality at the genetic level.
On the cover of my translation of Michel Jouvet's book (MIT Press, 1999) we see the famous well scene in the Lascaux cave, painted 18,000 years ago by our Cro-Magnon ancestors. A man lies with his arms outstretched, apparently sleeping soundly. A bird is perched beside him. In front of him are a wounded bison, with its entrails hanging out, and a broken spear. The man has an erection. The association of erection, a well-known feature of the dream state, in a prostrate figure with a bird might suggests that we are looking at a dreamer, dreaming of his desire to kill a bison. His immaterial thoughts are leaving his inert, material body, flying away like a bird to wander through space and time.