Medicine: To Sleep, To Dream. . .

To Sleep, To Dream . . .

Every night the human guinea pigs, after eating “test food,” went to bed with a battery of scientific apparatus hitched up to their toes, a microphone strapped to their stomachs. They did not have very comfortable nights. Ohio State Physiologist Hugh Boyd McGlade woke them periodically to ask if they were dreaming. He discovered that dreams were heralded by a “rapid rumbling” below the stomach, a twitching of the right foot. Good food to induce dreams, he found, was bananas. When his guinea pigs ate ice cream, fresh tomatoes or canned pineapple, they neither twitched, rumbled nor dreamed.

All this was reported last week by Physiologist McGlade in the staid American Journal of Digestive Diseases.