Rosalind Cartwright

Ironically, I had a bout of insomnia, and I was scrolling the New York Times app, and I found an obituary.

of a woman named Rosalind Cartwright who died at age 98.

She'd been a dream researcher and was dubbed the queen of dreams by all of her peers.

So way back in the 1970s and 80s, she was doing experiments in her laboratory and publishing studies that showed our dreams can be almost like a form of free therapy.

Her work really helped to resurrect the idea that our dreams were important, that they were worth paying attention to.

And I was just so taken by this obituary.

I thought, oh, my God, like who is picking up where Rosalind Cartwright left off?

My name is Dr. Harrison Chow.

Which raises a profound legal and philosophical question regarding culpability and the definition of consciousness.

This brings us to the pioneering work of Rosalind Cartwright, a researcher known as the Queen of Dreams.

What did she do?

In the 1980s and 90s, she served as an expert witness in several high-profile murder trials that centered entirely on sleepwalking automatism.

The amygdala calms down, the cortisol drops, the irony spiral breaks, and you usually pass out in 10 minutes.

And ensuring we get that high quality sleep is vital because of the profound emotional surgery that happens in REM.

Let's return to Rosalind Cartwright, the queen of dreams, to really drive this home.

Oh, her divorce study.

It was just my brain trying to make sense of these crazy waves that are being produced during REM sleep.

The fourth and final dream theory that I'm going to talk about is called the Cartwright theory and was developed by Rosalind Cartwright.

And she believed that dreams simply reflect life events that are important to the dreamer.

And Cartwright herself developed some empirical evidence that backed up her theory.

So what she did is she took a group of women that were going through divorce and she woke them up during REM sleep and asked them to report their dreams.

And what she noticed is that these women that were about to get divorced often dreamed of their significant other that they were being divorced from.