Do Dogs Dream?

If you’ve turned on your radio lately, you may have heard numerous singers “Dreaming of a White Christmas”. Now Finn isn’t writing any Christmas cards but you can bet your life if he heard sleigh bells, he’d be at the front door like a shot and as for snow, he just loves the stuff! I think it’s unlikely that he’s actually dreaming of a white Christmas but I do think he dreams. He can be lying in what appears to be a deep sleep and his tail will start thumping on the floor, his feet will twitch, he’ll body wriggle in something that looks like a seizure and even been known to whine(talking in his sleep?).
The answer to my original question is yes, dogs do dream while they sleep. In 2001, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) study on rats found that they 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. “Structurally, dog brains are very similar to human brains,” says Gary Richter, DVM, a veterinary health expert with Rover. “This means that dogs and humans have similar patterns of brain waves and brain activity while sleeping. Because of these similar brain wave patterns, dogs actually do experience multiple sleep stages during a standard sleep cycle, including dreams that cause rapid eye movement or REM sleep, which is where we see them twitching while sleeping,” says Dr. Richter. Readers Digest. Morgan Cutolo, October 2022
Matt Wilson the MIT researcher, is a neuroscientist who studies memory and learning, says dogs, and other animals, actually aren’t that different from us when it comes to certain aspects of sleep. “When you look at brain structure, when you look at sleep physiology, the brain activity that goes on, the equivalence of the sleep states, it’s all very comparable,” Wilson says, regarding the mammal family tree. Humans, dogs and all other mammals experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the sleep stage during which we experience dreams. We all also have similarly high levels of brain activity during this stage of sleep, and have a brain structure called the Pons Varolii¬–which paralyzes our major muscles during REM sleep to keep us from moving around too much and “acting out” our dreams–in common. Increasingly, we’re seeing that sleep and its functions, and very likely dreams, are something that are probably quite ubiquitous across the animal kingdom.”
If I call a sleeping Finn by name, he’ll be awake instantly with a look that can only say “What?”
So whether your dog is dreaming of a White Christmas or probably in Finn’s case chasing squirrels out of our backyard, it’s probably a good idea to let the sleeping dog lie. It’s not so much that interrupting the dream is bad, but pulling a dog abruptly out of REM sleep can be startling for them, which might confuse the dog or provoke an aggressive reaction. At the very least, you’re interrupting an important part of the sleep cycle, and robbing your dog of some well-deserved rest.
www.petmd.com/dog/general-health/do-dogs-dream