Linguistic organization and cognitive implications of REM and NREM sleep-related reports.

Verbal reports related to REM and NREM sleep were subjected to syntactic (taking Chomskian standard theory as model) and pragmatic analysis (pause distribution within and between kernel sentences). Both in REM and NREM-verbal reports descriptions of the mental experience during sleep were syntactically correct and indicated little difficulty in lexical choice and little emotion. Even though the strategy appears to be the same (sequential) in both cases, the retrieval of content appears to be more difficult after NREM than after REM sleep. Perhaps different degrees of content consolidation in memory occur during the two types of sleep.