Rapid eye movement sleep and general anesthesia.

摘要

I read with great interest the article by Leslie et al. describing the electroencephalographic correlates of dreaming during anesthesia. Their conclusion that traits of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are expressed during emergence from anesthesia is provocative. It is of historical interest to note that a common mechanism of dreaming during both sleep and anesthesia was predicted by the psychoanalyst Paul Federn, after the self-analysis of a dream that he experienced under nitrous oxide. Federn discussed this in a 1943 lecture to the American Psychoanalytic Association-one decade before the discovery of REM sleep by Aserinsky and Kleitman-and, in a later publication, concluded that "one can expect to find the basic mechanisms in dream-production during general anesthesia will not differ from those in dream-production during physiologic sleep."