Most dog owners have noticed their furry friend whimper, twitch or wag its tail while sleeping. Researchers have previously confirmed that canines do in fact dream.
Now, they say that in fact, the dream in a similar way to humans – and may even dream about their day as we do.
‘Why should we not have a great deal in common? After all we’re 95 percent identical genetically and physically,’ Dr. Nicholas Dodman, professor of behavioral pharmacology and animal behavior.
‘Our brains are similar, our neurochemistry the same, and our reflexes and memory are ‘wired’ in like manner.’
Experts say the ‘basic maker that indicates dreaming’ in humans is the motion of rapid eye movement (REM), which is when an individual’s eyes begin moving around inside their closed eye lids.
And researchers confirm that dogs experience the same thing.
‘In dogs, you can monitor when they’re having a dream quite easily,’ Dr. Stanley Coren, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the author of ‘Do Dogs Dream? Nearly Everything Your Dog Wants You to Know’, told DailyMail.com.
‘For a typical medium sized dog, their breathing is fairly regular and somewhere around 20 minutes into the sleep cycle, you can see the eyes moving around the closed lids and their breathing will become irregular.’
‘And sometimes you see twitching, like the dog is trying to do something, which indicates the dog is in the dream state and it will dream for about two to three minutes.’
Studies have shown that how much and how long a dog dreams depends on its size.
‘It turns out that small dogs dream more frequently and have shorter dreams and larger dogs dream less but have longer dreams’, said Coren.
Also, the age of a dog determines on how much time they spend in REM.
‘Puppies spend a much greater proportion of their sleep time than adult dogs in REM sleep, no doubt condensing huge quantities of newly acquired data,’ says Dodman.
Adult dogs spend about 10 to 12 percent of their sleeping time in REM sleep.’
In human brains, there is a mechanism that keeps our muscles from moving while we sleep.
However, when the switch is weak REM sleep behavior disorder can develop and individuals will act out their dreams while they are still asleep.
‘The same thing goes with dogs, if their switch doesn’t work that well you will see the dog running or snapping at something,’ says Coren.
Coren explains it is possible to control these off switches in a lab because researchers have pinpointed it in the old part of the brain — the medulla oblongata.
By inactivating these switches in the lab, scientists have been able to observe canines act out their dreams and decipher what they believe the dogs are dreaming of, he explains.
‘For human beings their dreams have to do with very common activities, things that happened during the day,’ says Coren.
‘And it seems that for dogs basically the same thing. Dogs dream about doing doggie things.’
‘A Pointer will point at a dream bird and a Doberman Pinscher will chase a dream robber.’
‘People often wonder whether dogs that seem to be running during sleep are dreaming of catching rabbits or suchlike,’ says Dodman.
‘I think, from the above discussion that one can safely say they are. Although no one really knows the true function of dreaming it does seem to be necessary for normal data processing and memory storage.’
‘In support of this is the fact that the same brain structures involved in memory are intimately involved in dreaming.’
There have been other dream studies performed on other mammals to understand if it is all mammals or just dogs that dream.
‘We have reason to suspect that most mammals dream,’ says Coren.
‘Cats dream, horses dream, but the nature of their dreams and cycles depend on the species.’
Although dogs may dream similar to humans, the amount of sleep is very different.
The average human sleeps about seven to eight hours per day, where an adult dog sleeps anywhere from 12 to 14 hours per day – about 50 percent of a dog’s day is sleep.
‘The most important thing about the fact dogs dream is that it demonstrates that not only is the dog’s brains somewhat structurally similar to the way a human brain works, it probably functions the same way –just a primitive human brain,’ says Coren.
