Each night, you journey to an imaginary land and encounter a colourful cast of curious characters, strange animals and supernatural entities. For centuries, people struggled to understand the true nature of these weird experiences. Then, in the early 1950s, the results from just one experiment changed everything.
In 1951, Eugene Aserinsky was working as a researcher at the University of Chicago studying eye movements in sleeping adults. At the time, most scientists thought that these eye movement were meaningless events that took place at random times throughout the night. Never one to follow the crowd, Aserinsky decided to measure his son’s eye movements throughout the night and discover if the movement followed some type of routine. In December 1951, 8-year-old Armond Aserinsky found himself lying in a laboratory bed with his head covered in sensors. Some of the sensors measured his brain activity and others monitored the muscles around his eyes.
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