By Steve Goodall
Published on 13 May 2024

We’ve all been there right? Watching our dogs as they snooze, taking enough photos of cute sleeping poses to fill the worlds largest external hard drive and cooing over any slight snoozy adjustment the might make. I’ve read that the average human can spend 73 hours on the toilet each year… I’d wager us dog lovers spend longer than that watching our beloved dogs sleeping.

I also imagine we’ve all wondered what might be going on in their heads when they sleep? Do the Terriers dream of catching rats? The hounds tracking and chasing Rabbits? The Labradors a pub lunch? I can’t remember why this thought entered my head (possibly I heard it on a podcast or read it in a book) but I find myself wondering often if dogs dream in scent? It makes sense, to a certain degree, that us human animals, being a very visual species, experience dreams in a much different way than our dogs.

So what did I do? I reached out to the one person I know is an expert on dogs and sleep Dr Amber Batson and asked If she’d heard of any research. Unfortunately this didn’t bear fruit the reply I got stated “I once heard that a study showed an increased response in the visual cortex of dreaming dogs but never got that verified in any research... So as far as I’m aware we have no idea!!”.

This piqued my interest more. The suggestion that there was an increased response in the visual cortex pointed towards a more “human like” dream experience but, alas, like so much out there in the world of dogs there is little research (as far as I can find anyhow). So what do we know about dogs and dreams? The jury is definitely out in terms of whether they dream. Scientists believe that most mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes dream in some way. I even found refence to something as small as a fruit fly dreaming (probably about tucking into a juicy tomato).

Us human animals go through similar sleep cycles these include: wakefulness, followed by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and non-rapid-eye-movement sleep. It’s during the REM stages that we have our most vivid, memorable dream experiences. One study I saw when looking through the internet talked about how when rats, who had spent all day running a maze, went to sleep the same areas of their brains lit up during REM sleep as when they were actually running the maze when awake! The scientists, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used specialised equipment that allowed them to compare the data and even work out exactly what part of the maze the rats were thinking about. That really gets you thinking right?

So it would seem that many animals have complex dreams, that allow them to replay, remember and even, potentially, problem solve when they are asleep. We know that dogs can spend half of the day sleeping (even longer for pups, older dogs and giant breeds) and that twitching that we see when our dogs are asleep definitely suggests that they are dreaming about running, chasing or even playing.

There is an interesting part of the brain, in both humans and dogs called the pons. I’d never heard of this before writing but, a quick google search reveals, “Your pons is a part of your brainstem, a structure that links your brain to your spinal cord. It handles unconscious processes and jobs, such as your sleep-wake cycle and breathing”. Sounds pretty important right? It also inhibits you from flailing around during dreams and accidentally falling out of bed or whacking your partner. Without it we’d all be acting out those incredible flying dreams with, potentially disastrous results. One of the reasons pups and older dogs twitch more is that the puppies pons is not yet developed and the older dogs is starting to become less efficient. This led to an interesting controlled experiment where researchers disabled the pons in some dogs to get an idea of what they dreamed about through observing what they acted out. The concluded that the actual dream patterns in dogs was strikingly similar to that of humans (although they seemed to be acting out all there doggy-like shenanigans whilst sleeping).

So, after going down this sleepy, yet wonderful wormhole, it would seem we aren’t going to find out if our dogs dream in scent anytime soon. Although we have some fascinating insights we can’t, at this point, know exactly what dogs dream of.

Are they dreaming of us when that tail wags? Are they having a nightmare when the bark or howl? What are they sniffing when that nose goes ten to the dozen? What I do know is that we’ll never bore of watching, wondering and guessing what might be going on in that wonderful brain when they’re snoozing. One thing we can say for sure is they are alike us in so, so many ways.

Sleep tight 😊

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