Thread: Dreaming Animals

I was just watching my twitching cat sleeping when a thought came to me. It's been proven that cats and dogs dream... but do they lucid dream? Does anyone think that cat's and dogs know when their dreaming or do u not think it is possible. Please give reasons.

I don't think it's possible. I say that because of the fact that most animals are generally considered to not be "conscious" in the same sense that we are. They are believed to not have the power of reflection or self-awareness that we do. They are also believed to not have the same powers of time comprehension, living only in the present.

To dream lucidly, one must be able to reflect on present reality and understand time.

I agree with GH. I highly doubt animals have the mental capacity to lucid dream.

Hey there,

I'm actually of the opinion that animals go through life much as we go through dreams. They have some consciousness, but not a lot, and mostly just react to circumstances and events much like we do in dreams. Early man would've been the same, in my mind.

But through language, we gained the ability to symbolise things, which allowed us to put more structure and order in our world and get a better grasp of it. The more we symbolise things, the more we gain consciousness. Image a concept like "Black is the opposite of white", this would be extremely difficult to explain to someone when all you have is your sensory input (images, sounds, feelings). With language, we gained the ability to add relationships to concepts, that we didn't have before. Representing black and white is easy in imagery. But representing 'is opposite to', is almost impossible. So language allows us to expand our consciousness to ever newer degrees.

Can animals do this? Maybe they have their own systems of symbolism. But for the most part, I'd be inclined to say no, which would mean that not only would they be unable to 'lucid dream', they'd actually be unable to 'lucid' wake

-Redrivertears-

I read something interesting about this, in Stephen LaBerge's book Lucid Dreaming. As part of an explanation of why dreams are so hard to recall, he said that we learn what dreams are by talking to other people, and since animals can't do that, they wouldn't even know the difference between dreams and reality when they're awake. If this is true, it makes sense that animals couldn't lucid dream, because it's unlikely animals could recognize a dream while asleep if they couldn't while awake.

Who says language is the only way to recognize a dream? Dogs sleep in a spot, they dream that they are in the yard, they wake up in the spot they slept in. I'd like to think they aren't stupid enough to believe that they just magically teleported there. I think after a while they'd recognize a correlation between sleeping and "being somewhere else," as in, dreaming. What I'm trying to say is that there are ways to overcome the language barrier--it just takes more time.

Also, I'm only talking about dogs here. Dogs have proven to us that they are pretty smart. Reptiles, small mammals, fish... Their brains are too small to comprehend much else aside from eating, mating, and fleeing. If my dog can tell the difference between his stuffed animals and my cousin's, and can tell the difference between a can of peas and a can of dog food (before opening), and can tell the difference between "I'm taking a bath," and "You're taking a bath," then I'm willing to bet they can also tell the difference between dreaming and reality (but probably not to the degree that we can).

I doubt dogs could lucid dream 'like a pro,' but low level lucidity probably does occur, just very, very rarely (rarer than the spontaneous LDs of humans, no doubt). I mean, honestly, we have so many cues that we are dreaming. Altered speech, malfunctioning machines, public situations, and altered text are among the biggest dream signs in humans. Dogs don't use speech, recognize text, or use lightswitches/computers/etc. What could act as their dream sign?

Moving away from dogs, dolphins are pretty damn smart. They even have more cerebral folding than us! Studies report that they not only know that the dolphin in the mirror isn't real, but that it is their own reflection! This knowledge is shared with no other animals... Except us. So yeah, they might have the intelligence for lucid dreaming. Pity is, they don't dream. D=

I don't really think they can LD for reasons above. Anyway, I just want to say, I love it when my dog wakes up from a dream and looks at me with a confused "what the HELL just happened?!" face. HAHAHAH

Thanks for the reply guys, I think I'm starting to lean towards the "they cant lucid dream" side cos u guys have pretty much convinced me. Although we'll never really know for sure... or will we?