Teaching About Sleep, Dreams, & A Safer Life

The year 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of the Sleep and Dreams course at Stanford University. Over those years, our teacher, Dr. William C. Dement, has taken his classes on a journey through understanding a portion of their lives that is all too often overlooked.

In honor of that anniversary, this website was created by a group of Dr. Dement’s students in an attempt to bring that extraordinary journey to even more people, including you.

Learn more about the people and the story behind this website.

Memorial Auditoriam packed with Sleep and Dreams students ready for class.

The truth is that the world is still largely uneducated about sleep. Considering that sleep takes up nearly a third of all of our lives, a very large proportion of people have sleep disorders of some kind, and that mismanaged sleep contributes to hundreds of thousands of accidents every year, this gap in knowledge is something we feel needs to change.

Dr. Dement has made that his life mission, and in honor of that, we extend this website to you. We hope you thoroughly enjoy the history in it, the science, the practicality, the videos, and the knowledge. You have the resources here to become more educated about sleep and dreams than 99.9% of the world. That said, we encourage you to empower yourself with that knowledge, use it to optimize your life, and be active in spreading it to others.

The Sleep And Dreams Outreach Projects

Each year, the students in Sleep and Dreams embark on a quest to spread the knowledge that exists about sleep and sleep disorders using projects they organize and put together.

Students Beth R., Anne, and Beth D. hosting a sleep awareness day in February 2009.

Teenagers, college students, and adults are, as a whole, drastically uneducated about even basic sleep science, and this doesn’t seem to make sense given the monumental importance of sleep. It consumes a third of our lives, and its mistreatment is the cause for large amounts of accidents and deaths every year, as well as a massive fallout in productivity.

With this in mind, the Stanford students have undertaken the task of reaching more people about the importance of sleep, and imparting a plethora of sleep knowledge along the way.

You can see many of those projects from the last few years using the links below (the 2009 page brings you to DrowsinessIsRedAlert.com):