Episode 273 – Animal Dreams

After I finished editing this podcast, I started thinking about how active the process of breaking down and establishing new neuronal circuits must be when replacing old established behaviors and ideas with new ones. How does this affect human and animal dreams, I wondered.

For some inexplicable reason, that caused me to remember a time when I was editing a book for a friend at the same time as I was working one of my own. During this period I had, for lack of a better term, a double reality dream that was patterned after a scene in the play, 1776, that I’d seen many years before. In the play, a gossamer curtain with a copy of Declaration of Independence written on it was lowered from the ceiling while the signers were doing their thing on the stage behind it. This created the illusion that one was observing this famous event in US history through a curtained window.

Apparently this special effect struck me as sufficiently noteworthy that it remained tucked in my mind somewhere because my dream years later parodied this scene. On my “real” stage, I could see myself editing my friend’s book. But in order to see this, I needed to look through a  filmy curtain with material from my own book written on it. And as I recall, I could hear myself reading the words from both books out loud as well as see them.

Do animals experience similarly layered dreams? No doubt such a thought would give conniption fits to those afraid to attribute cognitive abilities to animals. But the way I see it, the fact that we lack the perception or enhanced technology necessary to determine anything meaningful about this aspect of animal dreams doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.