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In this slender volume Ian Oswald attempts both to review the current physiologic and psychologic literature on sleep and wakefulness and to organize the literature in terms of a theory of mental life, based both on the experimental findings of modern neurophysiology and the psychologic speculations of Head and the faculty psychologists. It is in the presentation of the theoretic framework within which the literature is reviewed that this book makes its greatest impact. The chapters in which this presentation is made are entitled "The Physiological Basis of Sleep," "Sleep and Consciousness," "The Physiological Basis of Human Sleep," "The EEG of Sleep," "The Decline of Cerebral Vigilance," "Attention and Imagery," and "The Borderland."
Briefly, Oswald views sleep and wakefulness as recurrent fluctuations in the degree of overt and covert responsiveness to external and internal stimuli due to concurrent fluctuations in ascending activating