If you’ve ever seen your dog moving their paws or letting out small barks during sleep, you know they’re capable of dreaming. But what do dogs dream about? Here’s what scientists have to say.
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In the 1960s, neuroscientist Michel Jouvet studied cats with lesions in the pons (part of the brainstem responsible for muscle atonia), which prevents animals from moving during the sleep stage known as REM.
He found that while technically asleep, they jumped and scratched, a strong sign that they were dreaming. About what, you ask? Exactly what you might expect: hunting prey.
According to the book Do Dogs Dream? Nearly Everything Your Dog Wants You to Know by psychology professor Stanley Coren, who studies canine behavior, dogs exhibited similar behavior.
This means it’s possible to infer what dogs dream about based on their waking obsessions, such as grabbing bits of food that fell on the floor during dinner, playing in the park with other dogs, being petted by their owner, and so on.
However, the way they experience these dreams may be entirely strange to us, considering that, according to experts in canine behavior, dogs experience the world through smells.
A dog’s nose contains hundreds of millions of scent receptors, compared to humans’ roughly 6 million. So it’s reasonable to assume they experience their dreams through smells, according to professor David M. Peña-Guzmán of San Francisco State University.
With that in mind, we may never know exactly what dogs dream about and what those dreams are like. But, considering what we know about their emotions, social life, and memory, we can demarcate “the space of what is possible” in their dreams, he says.
So according to him, “as soon as you can reasonably attribute the dream to a creature, then you automatically have to attribute consciousness” to it.
“Dreaming is an internal reality that one lives through. And that’s usually what we understand by consciousness. It’s something that an organism goes through and that reveals to it a certain kind of world,” Peña-Guzmán said in conversation with Popular Science.
And seeing your dog as a conscious and dreaming being can change your personal relationship with them. “I think that wonder can be an ethical gesture on our part, because it introduces a moment of pause or hesitation in our relationship with animals that reminds us that they are their own subjects with their own lives, in which we may be an important part.”
“But ultimately, they are not here to help or serve us. They are in this world to live their own existence,” Peña-Guzmán concluded.
This content was created with the assistance of AI.
