ABSTRACT
Sleep is not only conditioned by environmental heat and cold but it functions, actively, to maintain body temperature in the face of environmental fluctuations in temperature. The brain only operates properly within a very narrow temperature range. Sleep and dream science thus indicate that energy regulation and information processing are functionally linked. Dreams are, for the most part, harmless even if they are, sometimes, downright entertaining. Dreaming may be the essential and informative psychological experience of a special sort of brain activation occurring in sleep which allows the brain to reiterate its epigenetic model of the world and to modify that model in terms of its daytime experience. As the brain begins to pay back its REM sleep debt, the alcoholic becomes psychotic with dreamlike features coloring his or her madness. Alcoholics subject themselves to REM sleep deprivation because of the REM-suppressant effects of their favorite beverages.
