Does Your Dog Dream About You?

It is two in the morning, and your dog's paws are twitching in its sleep. You smile and think it is chasing a rabbit. It almost certainly is not. What a sleeping dog is doing is stranger, and far more personal, than chasing anything. A dream, it turns out, is mostly a replay. The brain runs the day back to save it, and it saves what mattered most. We know this from rats who re-ran their maze in their sleep so precisely you could read where they were dreaming they were, and from cats who, with one switch flipped off, stood up and acted out their dreams. And for a dog, whose whole world is built around a single face, the thing that mattered most today was almost certainly you. Your dog is very likely dreaming about you. And in the dreaming, filing you into the most permanent part of what it is. This is the strange science of what your dog dreams: the maze rats, the sleepwalking cats, why small dogs dream more often than big ones, why you should let a sleeping dog lie, and the reason that twitching paw at two in the morning is the most personal thing your dog does. Sources: Matthew Wilson, MIT (2001) · Michel Jouvet, University of Lyon (1965) · Stanley Coren, University of British Columbia · Iotchev & Kubinyi, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest (2017, 2020). If you like the strange science hiding in ordinary life, the body, the brain, animal minds, deep time, subscribe. New videos on the strange science of ordinary things. #dogdreams #dogs #whatdogsdreamabout #animalcognition #neuroscience