J. Allan Hobson

John Allan Hobson (1933–2021) was an American psychiatrist who spent nearly five decades at Harvard Medical School researching the neurophysiology of sleep and dreaming, founding the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in 1967 after a residency with sleep researcher Michel Jouvet in Lyon. In 1977, with colleague Robert McCarley, he published the activation-synthesis model — the first biologically based theory proposing that dreams arise from the cortex making sense of essentially random neural firing during REM sleep, directly challenging Freudian dream interpretation. That same year he designed Dreamstage, a public exhibit translating a sleeping subject’s live brain signals into light and music, which toured internationally and later grew into a small museum on his Vermont farm.