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Are Dreams as Vital as Sleep? by Roger Louis Can dreams be controlled at our own will? Is dreaming the ability of all animals? How do the deaf-mutes and the mentally disabled dream? The following article discusses these issues. Sooner or later biologists were bound to investigate one of the brains most mysterious functions, probably the least tangible and the least comprehensible function of the body, dreaming. Just a few years ago we thought that Freud1, when he took the keys to the city of dreams away from the philosophers and poets, had given them once and for all to the psychologists and psychiatrists2. But now biologists, biochemists and neuropsychologists3 are invading what used to be thought an exclusive preserve. One of these is a Frenchman, Dr. Michel Jouvet, whose research at the medical school of Lyons is internationally recognized as authoritative and on the same plane as that of Professor Nathaniel Kleitman in the United States, which has been continued since 1960 by one of his colleagues, Dr. William Dement. It was more or less by chance that Dr. Jouvet became interested in dreams in 1958, or rather it was the logic inherent in any experimental work that stimulated his curiosity. “I was interested at that time in confirming Pavlovs4 theories of conditioning, using cats as test animals,” he told us. “We had put electrodes in the muscles of their paws in order to check on certain movements.” “During their sleep we noted an unexpected phenomenon that occurred sporadically － the complete disappearance of muscular tone, sometimes lasting for several minutes, after which muscular tone reappeared while the animal continued to sleep. “We thought of all possible theories to explain this phenomenon. It even occurred to us that it might be connected with the very special role that whiskers play in the cat, and we actually tried cutting them off to see whether this might have some effect. Only after a long period of groping, did we realize that there was a p