DO DOGS DREAM? UNDERSTANDING DOG SLEEP BEHAVIOR

Ever see your dog thumping his leg or even whining during an afternoon nap? Does it really mean they’re having a bad dream?

If you wonder about your dog’s nighttime activities, we’ve got all the answers below.

YOUR DOG’S SLEEP PATTERNS

As anyone who owns a dog can probably tell you, dogs sleep a lot. In fact, the American Kennel Club estimates that most dogs spend about half of their day sleeping, and the other half split between 30% of relaxation and 20% of actual activity.

This is due to a variety of reasons. Mainly, the sleeping patterns of a dog are different from that of a human. Since they’re hard-wired for alertness and protection, dogs only spend around 10% of their sleep time in REM (versus the 25% humans spend). 

REM (rapid eye movement) is the final stage of sleep; the stage where dreaming occurs most intensely. You dream mostly in the second half of your sleep cycle. Part of sleep is processing the day’s experiences, and dreaming is how our brains synthesize this information. 

When we don’t get enough sleep, we lose critical portions of this REM stage. REM dreams are full of emotion, emotions which strengthen your brain’s neural connections and may help form memories. We damage this memory processing system without enough sleep.

The same is true for your dog. While you go through two sleep cycles per slumber, your dog goes through four. Most of this is spent teetering on the surface of wakefulness, while human sleep valleys much deeper into NREM (non-rapid eye movement) and SWS (slow wave sleep, or deep sleep) stages.

When your dog wakes you to plead to be let out, it’s disrupting their sleep as much as yours. Dogs that don’t adapt to the daily timelines of their owners, those suffering from consistent anxiety, and those with health issues will lose key portions of this memory analyzing quadrant of sleep, so be sure to teach them healthy sleep habits early on. Unlike humans, dogs take their own bodily cues to sleep (as they don’t have schedules of their own), so they engage in longer, shallower resting periods.

DO DOGS DREAM?

When your dog twitches in its sleep, they’re experiencing the REM stage—complete with vivid dreams, visible rapid eye movements, and shallow, quick breathing. Dream patterns actually vary between dog sizes. “Smaller dogs have more frequent but shorter dream periods,” researchers report, “while large dogs have less frequent but longer dreams.”

Because dog sleep cycles are so similar to humans, it’s reasonable to infer that the REM stage brings them dreams as well. This is as good as proven by those dreamlike behaviors we see them displaying during sleep.

It’s also backed up by science. Perhaps one of the most notable of these dream experiments involved rats who researchers found dreamed about the mazes they ran. During the “day,” researchers took electrical signals from the rats' brains as they learned the maze, committing it to memory. These electrical signals were distinguishable to different sections and activities within the maze. When the rats fell asleep, these same signals lit up in their brains during the REM stage, showing that they were reliving learning the maze and strengthening their memories of it during sleep. As discussed above, these are key actions tied to dreaming. In fact, these ‘dreams’ were so specific that researchers could tell from the signal patterns “where in the maze the rat would be if it were awake, and whether it would be moving or standing still.”

Because rats can dream, it’s reasonable to assume that the more complex biology of a dog can accomplish the same feat.

But what is your dog dreaming about?

Researchers set their sights on the same question, conducting a study that allowed dogs to recreate what they were dreaming about. Their findings? As researcher Stanley Coren reports: “Dogs dream doggy things.” Turns out, we were assuming correctly all this time.

So, yes. Next time you ask yourself, “why does my dog twitch during sleep?” The answer is probably a very engaging dream. Let’s hope it’s a good one!

Dreams are just one of your furry friend’s quirks. If another is leaving stains on the lawn, we’ve got a solution for that. Dog Rocks are a natural, chemical-free way to cut off nitrate over-production at the source.

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