Rapid eye movement sleep resemblance to waking life), and incorporation of instinctual themes. Sometimes they include elements of the dreamer's recent experience taken directly from episodic memory. By one estimate, 80% of dreams occur during REM. Hobson and McCarley proposed that the PGO waves characteristic of “phasic” REM might supply the visual cortex and forebrain with electrical excitement which amplifies the hallucinatory aspects of dreaming. However, people woken up during sleep do not report significantly more bizarre dreams during phasic REMS, compared to tonic REMS. Another possible relationship between the two phenomena could be that the higher threshold for sensory interruption during REM sleep
Rapid eye movement sleep humor, the liquid between cornea and iris, was stagnant if not stirred. Among the supportive evidences, he calculated that if aqueous humor was stagnant, oxygen from iris had to reach cornea by diffusion through aqueous humor, which was not sufficient. According to the theory, when the animal is awake, eye movement (or cool environmental temperature) enables the aqueous humor to circulate. When the animal is sleeping, REM provides the much-needed stir to aqueous humor. This theory is consistent with the observation that fetuses, as well as eye-sealed newborn animals, spend much time in REM sleep, and that during a normal