Will dogs and cats dream dream

Owners of cats and dogs paying enough attention to their pets often claim that their pets have dreams. It’s only worth watching the animals a little to make sure of that. Under the eyelids can be noticeable fast eye movements, cats are able to move through their paws as if chasing someone, dogs – to speculate and even bark. For a long time scientists considered this only empty desire of the hosts to endow their pets with human traits, however then conducted several experiments and found out that cats and dogs can indeed see dreams.

Sleep mechanism

During slow sleep, breathing and pulse slows down, muscle tone decreases. Neither an animal nor a person in a similar state sees any dreams. Like humans, animals observe dreams only in the phase of rapid, or, as it is called, paradoxical sleep. At this time, tone comes to normal, eyes begin to move under the eyelids. That’s when various things can dream up.

As in humans, in a cat and dog, the rapid sleep phase takes about 20 -25% of all time allocated to rest. However, this is different in puppies and kittens. For example, the phase of paradoxical sleep in small puppies takes 90% of the time.

Blue spot experiments

Scientists have found out that cats and dogs see dreams, but they still did not give rest to the question, what exactly the animals dream, why they are angry, scared whining, or moving their paws in their sleep. A not-too-humane experiment helped clarify the situation. A tiny zone dubbed the “blue spot” is present in the brain. It is the blue spot that prevents sleepers from performing all those actions they do in their sleep. In the beginning, scientists conducted an experiment on the cat, subjecting the blue spot to destruction. During the day, the animal behaved as usual — it ate, washed, purred and hunted for a bow on a rope, like ordinary cats. Plunging into the slow sleep phase, the cat was also no different from the healthy representative of the feline family. However, during the rapid sleep phase, the animal walked around the room, chased its own tail or washed.

A similar experiment was soon staged on dogs as well. The man’s four-legged friends engaged in the same thing as usual: guard dogs barked loudly, driving away uninvited guests, hunting – catching up with prey.

According to research, dogs of miniature breeds sleep more often than large dogs.

In the course of experiments it turned out that animals during rest, mostly, dream what they did during the day – whether hunted down the chicken, fought with the neighbor cat or chasing passing cars.$ In this, dogs and cats aren’t too different from humans.