The book Sleep was written by J. Allan Hobson during 1989 and was published by the Scientific American library. J. Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and Director of the Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He wrote a series of books for his classes at Harvard Medical School, including The Dreaming Brain.

There has been more research and learning in the field of sleep and dreaming in the past 60 years than in the last 6 millennia. Hobson states in his book that only animals with highly developed brains can `sleep', while every other animal simply rests.

In 1809, Italian Luigi Rolando experimented with different types of birds to see what effect the brain had on sleep. He removed the front part of many different types of birds' brains and noted that the altered specimens seemed sleepier and more lethargic after. Again, in 1822, Marie-Jean-Pierre...