What our pets dream about

I’m sure that you’ve seen it. A cat curls up into a ball and in a minute, her whiskers start to twitch or its eyes open slightly as it sleeps. Dogs are known to be twitching their paws, wagging their tail or showing signs of barking. While looking at your sleeping pets, are you also interested in what they might be dreaming about right now?

Scientists from the Harvard Medical School were curious as well. They observed the behaviour of cats and dogs and measured their brain activity. Since all mammals have a similar sleep cycle, including the REM phase during which we dream.

Scientists neutralised a part of the brain of the sleeping cats, which limits movement during sleep. When they reached the REM phase, cats started to prowl around the room, hiss and they looked like they were on a hunt. In dogs, it is likely that they dream about running around with other dogs or frolicking with their masters.

British professor Nicholas Dodman, expert on animal behaviour and behavioural pharmacology, says that dog dreams are in many aspects similar to human ones. And that dogs might even be dreaming about us.

Another hypothesis concerns itself with the length and frequency of dreams in dogs. Following this hypothesis, smaller dogs have shorter, but more frequent dreams, whereas large ones dream less frequently, but longer. Age also plays a role. Puppies spend a longer time in the REM phase than adult dogs.

Another way how to find out what dogs dream about, is to monitor the medulla oblongata, since precisely this area is the one responsible for dreams. And scientists learned how to monitor and influence it. Because of this, they can estimate, what’s going on in dog dreams. And it really seems, that they don’t differ much from the human ones. Same as us, dogs dream about what they did during the day, or about something that they’ve experienced. Since we spend a substantial part of the day with our pets, it’s no wonder that our dreams can be similar.

However, they can also have nightmares, even though not as fantastic as ours. These are probably real situations, when the dog was feeling scared. For example, my timid bitch was whining from sleep quite often. My dog sometimes growls, but he might be only dreaming that someone is taking his ball.

With greatest probability, we can say, that both cats and dogs dream about their life and about us. After all, they do visit our dreams quite often. The dogs might be dreaming, how they fly around a meadow, retrieve, play with us, get treats or how they just cuddle with us. And even though cats never stop letting the people around know that they don’t need humans at all, I’m sure, that they also dream about us sometimes, despite the fact that they would never admit that themselves. Among dreams about good pate, chasing after mice and playing with toys or sunbathing on a windowsill, there are for sure a few dreams about us people.