Rosalind F. Dymond Cartwright Ph.D.

1922 - 2021

Rosalind Dymond Cartwright, Ph.D., pioneering scientist died January 15, 2021 at 98. She was known as the "Queen of Dreams."

She was born December 30, 1922 in New York to Henry and Stella Hein Falk along with siblings Eleanor, Norma and John. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology from The University of Toronto. She earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1949. At a time when women were discouraged from careers in general, she became a pioneer in the fields of psychology, psychological sleep science and clinical sleep medicine and was one of the first women to establish herself in those fields. She wrote four books and hundreds of scholarly papers on the topics of psychology, sleep and dreaming. She sat on and chaired committees at the NIMH and NIH, ensuring that women and women's issues were represented in research studies. In 1962, she built her first sleep lab at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, studied the relationship between REM sleep and dreaming and wrote her first book, "Night Life; Explorations in Dreaming" 1977, Prentice Hall. She became professor and chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago and founder and director of one of the first clinical centers for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders there. She studied the sleep and dreams of couples during divorce to discern the role of dreams in overcoming trauma. She discovered that those who processed trauma through their dreams were more likely to recover quickly. She published those results in the book, "Crisis Dreaming", Harper Collins. In 2004 she was named Distinguished Scientist of The Year, by the Sleep Research Society. She treated patients with; Depression, Insomnia, Sleep Apnea, Sleepwalking and other disorders of sleep. She acted as an expert witness at trial to advise on the mental states of people who had committed crimes in their sleep and to educate lawyers and juries on the science of sleep. Using scientific proof she explained how sleepwalkers can act without knowledge of their actions, and could therefore be considered not wholly responsible for their crimes. Individuals were exonerated as a result of her testimony. She retired at 86 and became Professor Emerita. In 2010 she published, "The Twenty Four Hour Mind; The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives", Oxford University Press, bringing together decades of research on sleep and its disorders to present a new theory of how the human brain works to process and integrate the content of the day. She worked well into her 90's completing a second edition of her last book. She is preceded in death by her husband, Richard P. Dennis and her daughter Christine Cartwright. She is survived by her daughter Carolyn Cartwright, and grandson Maximilian Meyers, her stepdaughter Amy Russell and son-in-law Bret Russell, her grandchildren Matthew and Mark Russell, her niece Mara Thompson and nephews Andrew, Peter and John Quirt and her great-grandchildren. Memorial Services will be held at Drake & Son Funeral Home, Chicago, Illinois at a future time due to travel restrictions resulting from Covid-19.