Do animals have complex dreams like people?

Yes

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by M. L. Kiser

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I am awakened by my cat's cries as she lies at the foot of my bed. I am reading and look up to see her looking dazed, ears laid back flat in an aggressive fashion. She is breathing hard and fast and looks at me as if she is surprised that I am there with her. I reach over and rub her neck and head and try to comfort her and gradually she begins to calm and her rapid breathing slows to a more normal rate. Clearly, she has been having some sort of nightmare.

As every loving pet owner knows, our pets dream the same as we dream. While perhaps the content of their dreams is different, they do have very complex extended dreams and you can sometimes tell whether it's a good or bad dream by the way they act while they are sleeping. Who has a pet and hasn't had the feeling that they were running from or chasing something in their sleep? The motion of our pet's paws as they dream, flicking and jerking or even scratching can often give clues to what they might be dreaming about.

Modern Science has known for quite a while that animals do dream. In January of 2007, the journal, "Neuron" reported that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT), in Cambridge, MA, reported that animal's brains showed the same states of sleep as human brains.

The researchers looked at the actual firing patterns of the neurons or individual cells in rat's brains while engaged in a task such as running around a maze and while asleep and determined that rats, like humans, had very complex dreams that were connected to actual experiences. The rats were going through the same stages of sleep as humans do; from slow-wave patterns to REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep.

The hippocampus is the area in the brain that is involved with memory. Most dreaming in animals and humans occurs during REM sleep. Long-term memories may reoccur when the memories are reactivated during sleep.

The pattern of brain activity that is associated with memory is very unique and called a signature. The signature that is created in memory during an activity while awake is also the same signature that is recorded during sleep.

More than 40 episodes were recorded while the test rats slept. Researchers found that as the animals dreamt, they could actually reconstruct where the animal would be inside of a maze if it was awake and if the animal was running, walking or standing still as it dreamt.

Research has also found that REM sleep varies between species. While a cat may sleep up to 14 hours a day, only about 3 hours of this is actual REM sleep. Humans can have about one hour of REM while a giraffe may only get a half hour or REM.

From such studies, we can not only learn more about our own human dreams, but this research may also help us to understand memory disorders such as Amnesia or Alzheimer's disease.

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