Sleep science
Do animals dream?
Almost certainly something like it. What the evidence shows, and where honest description stops.
5 min readbeginnerStrictly reviewed · cited
What is established
REM sleep occurs in all mammals studied and in birds. Animals in REM show the same signature: brain activity resembling waking, muscle atonia, and eye movement.
Experiments in which the brainstem region responsible for atonia is disabled produce animals that appear to act out complex behaviours during REM, stalking, fleeing, grooming, while asleep.
Studies recording hippocampal place-cell activity in rats have found patterns during sleep that replay sequences from waking navigation, in the same order.
What that supports
That animals experience something during REM, and that it is related to waking experience.
Where honest description stops
We cannot ask them. Dream reports are the only direct evidence of dream content in humans, and no equivalent exists for any other species. Anything beyond "something is happening, and it resembles waking experience" is inference.
The dog twitching in front of the fire
Probably dreaming, in some sense. That is about as far as the evidence goes, and it is further than it sounds.
Sleep-science pages summarise published research for general education. They are not a substitute for a clinician. If a sleep problem is affecting your health, speak to a doctor, and never change prescribed medication because of something you read here.
Sources and reviewed references
2 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During SleepPeer-reviewed research
Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman (1953) · Science
Cited for: The discovery of REM sleep and its association with dream recall, the founding observation of modern sleep science.
- 2.The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream ProcessPeer-reviewed research
J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley (1977) · American Journal of Psychiatry
Cited for: The activation-synthesis model: that dream narrative is partly the forebrain making sense of brainstem-generated activity.