Question: What encouraged you to reasearch sleep?

Alex Reid answered on 5 Nov 2018:

Hi thanks for the question. I got into it through art actually. There was an art movement called ‘surrealism’ which focused on painting the unconscious mind and dreaming. This led to some pretty weird and wonderful pictures. I started doing research into dreams as a result, but over time I was drawn into measuring other aspects of sleep psychology (in particular memory) because dreams are very very hard to measure, and as scientists we need good, clear measures!

Here is a picture from a surrealist painter called Salvador Dali if you are interested: https://www.dalipaintings.com/persistence-of-memory.jsp#prettyPhoto