Can you explain to someone without a graduate degree in biochemistry what about "synthesis of molecular chaperones that guard against aggregation of chains produced during NREM" is amusing?
It's not amusing in a bad way, it's not ridiculous. I mean to say that it's highly surprising and counterintuitive, like a punchline in a joke. Most theories about REM are focused on brain function, as is almost all research on it. Chaperone production, though, is a basic housekeeping routine. Saying "well, REM isn't about episodic memory consolidation or dreaming or wherever you might think, it's an epiphenomenon of a very low-level mechanism that prevents boiling alive" is almost as unorthodox as claiming that learning to code is about forearms' dexterity.