• Question: Do animals dream like us human do?

    Asked by to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      I think they do. My parents have a dog at home, and I’ve watched him sleeping. Sometimes he barks in his sleep, and his legs twitch like he’s running. I’d bet that he’s dreaming about running around a field chasing rabbits or a tennis ball 🙂

      Unless we figure out a way for animals to talk to us in a way that we both understand, we’ll never know for certain though.

    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Ciaran is right, looking at movement during sleep is a good way to get an idea if animals are dreaming.
      Some scientist have also investigated changes in brain chemistry and cell activity during sleep in many groups of animals.
      For example, scientists looked at the activity of brain cells in rats when they ran a maze and recorded them. Then they looked at the brain activity of those rats when they were sleeping and twitching as if they were running. What they found was that the exact same brain cells were active during sleep as they were when the rat had ran the maze during the day. They concluded that the rat dreamed about the maze!

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