Not long ago I woke up in the middle of the night. Emma’s paws and lips were twitching. Was she dreaming?
Dogs spend about half their day sleeping. For puppies, senior dogs, and larger breeds, the time spent sleeping can be even longer.
Interestingly, the sleep pattern in dogs resembles the sleep pattern in humans. Just like humans, dogs experience sleep cycles through states of wakefulness, rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, and non-rapid-eye-movement sleep. People dream in both REM and non-REM sleep, but the dreams that most people remember are REM dreams. In this stage, dreams are memorable and often weird.
In 1977, scientists recorded the electrical activity of the brains of six dogs for 24 hours. They found that the dogs spent 44% of their time alert, 21% drowsy, 12% in REM sleep and 23% of their time in the deepest stage of non-REM sleep, called slow-wave sleep.
However, do dogs dream?
Well, in 2001 a study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that rats trained to run in a maze exhibited similar brain activity during REM sleep to that when they were in the maze, suggesting that the rats were dreaming about the maze they ran in earlier. Other studies revealed similar results in which brain activity during sleep matched the activity recorded during the animal’s wakeful hours. This suggests that animals have dreamlike periods during their REM sleep cycle, similar to humans.
Do I know what Emma is dreaming when she is twitching in her sleep? No, but I could speculate she is doing something fun, most likely one of her favorite activities – either playing fetch, swimming, or chasing the squirrel that lives in our backyard.
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