Clubs Offering:
What do dogs dream about? Have you ever wondered? Is she really hunting rabbits, or is she just twitching in her sleep? Do dogs dream as we do?
While we don’t have all of the answers, scientists are taking steps to figure out dog dreams, bringing us one step closer to understanding our canine companions.
Humans don’t have a monopoly on dreams. In fact, scientists believe that most vertebrates, and maybe even the humble fruit fly, can – and do – dream on a regular basis.
Like us, dogs and other animals go through several sleep cycles. There are periods of wakefulness, followed by Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, and non-rapid-eye-movement sleep. REM sleep is the period responsible for the most memorable and vivid dreams and is believed to be a part of how the body processes memory, among other things. Scientists can track these cycles and associated brain activity using specialized equipment.
One of the most famous of these dream experiments involved lab rats. These rats spent all day running in a maze. Scientists monitored the brain activity of the rats in the maze and compared it to the brain activity of the rats during REM sleep. What they found was that the same areas lit up in the rats’ brains, which meant that the rats were likely to be dreaming of the maze, and by comparing the data the researchers could figure out where exactly in the maze the rats had dreamed themselves.
This suggested to the researchers that animals tend to dream as we do. The rats dreamed about their day, just like you might find yourself back in the office in your dreams, even if you would rather have dreamed yourself someplace more exciting. Researchers at MIT concluded that animals have complex dreams, and they can remember and replay long sequences of events when they are asleep.
The National Sleep Foundation reports that dogs spend about half their day sleeping. For puppies, senior dogs, and larger breeds, time spent sleeping can be even longer.
Most dogs lead more interesting lives than rats. To figure out what dogs might dream of, researchers performed a test that temporarily disabled the pons.
If, like me, you’d never heard of the pons before this, let me explain. The pons is the part of the brain stem that is involved in the control of sleep cycles and the regulation of deep sleep and is responsible for inhibiting your large muscles from moving during sleep. In other words, you can thank the pons for preventing your partner from flailing around during dreams and waking you up. Without the pons, we might act out everything we were dreaming about — probably with disastrous results.
You may have noticed that puppies and older dogs twitch and move a lot in their sleep. This is because the pons is underdeveloped in puppies and less efficient in older dogs, according to Stanley Coren, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia. The same is true for human infants and older adults.
Researchers figured out that one of the ways to discover what dogs might dream about is to temporarily disable the pons during REM sleep. This allowed them, under carefully controlled conditions, to let the dogs act out their dreams.
The results were pretty much what we’ve all suspected for years.
“What we’ve basically found is that dogs dream doggy things . . . The dream pattern in dogs seems to be very similar to the dream pattern in humans,” according to the researchers.
Do dogs dream?The answer is yes, dogs do dream while they sleep. An MIT study found that rats dream about the activities they performed earlier in the day. They had the same unique brain activity while they ran through a maze as they did while they were sleeping, which the researchers took to mean that they were likely having a dream about running through the maze. This led to the conclusion that more complex animals such as cats and dogs also dream about things they’ve experienced, just like we do. Your
What do dogs dream about?
Like humans, dogs experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is the deepest phase of sleep where dreaming usually occurs.
“If REM and dreaming works the same way in dogs as in humans, then they probably have dreams about their daily dog experiences,” says M. Leanne Lilly, clinical assistant professor and section head of Behavioral Medicine at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
Though there is no way to know for sure what dogs dream about, some small studies and anecdotal accounts give us clues.
In one experiment, researchers temporarily deactivated dogs pons, the part of the brain that inhibits large muscles from moving during sleep. Under very careful conditions, they were able to observe the sleeping dogs drowsily acting out their dreams.
The researchers speculated that the dogs acted just like they would when active — chasing imaginary birds and behaving normally.
In another account, a man theorized that his dog had just woken up from a dream about bathtime. He knew this because his dog fearfully ran and hid between his legs after waking up, a behavior that only occurs after being bathed.
Experts Figured Out What Dogs Dream About And People Are Freaking Out
Unlike humans, dogs can not lie down on a therapist’s couch and describe their dreams. It can only be assumed that dogs have dreams. Though it is impossible to get a first-hand account of their dreams, scientific evidence indicates that dogs do, indeed, dream.
