Sanford is borrowing Dement's sleep-deprivation research to make a claim that cuts deeper than either man quite intended. If REM disruption reliably produces psychotic-like symptoms within days, then dreaming is not incidental to waking life — it is one of the conditions of waking life's coherence. Freud's formulation already honored the dream by making it functional, a pressure-valve that lets the sleeper stay asleep by metabolizing wish. But a pressure-valve can be removed and replaced. A guardian of sanity cannot. Remove it and the self begins to come apart at the seams that were always held together by something the ego never managed alone.

What this suggests about the dream's authority is considerable. The ego that dismisses its dreams as noise is dismissing the very process that keeps it intact enough to do the dismissing. There is something almost comic in that posture — the refusal of the night life by a structure that the night life quietly maintains. Jung's insistence that dreams are not disguised communications but spontaneous self-portraits of the psyche's actual condition becomes, in this light, not mysticism but hygiene. The soul is not sending messages. It is running the machinery. Whether or not the ego checks the gauges is a separate question.