The Enchanted World of Sleep

Most of us take sleep for granted, except of course on those long nights when it refuses to come. But for Peretz Lavie, head of the Sleep Laboratory at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, sleep is every bit as important as wakefulness. Amidst the anecdotes, stories and literature can be found revealing sleep research such as the study of a group of students in Israel during the Gulf War, who, five weeks into the conflict, reported that half their dreams dealt with the war and that the most common recurring image was the gas mask.