Shayla Love – Many people who live with animals have had the experience of watching their pets exhibit odd behaviors while sleeping, like twitching their feet, barking or whining, or moving their eyes back and forth. It’s common for pet owners to say things like, “Look, they’re dreaming,” and wonder if their terrier, when he grunts in a satisfied-seeming manner, is dreaming about chasing squirrels and foxes through an endless and perfect grassy field.
But the actual scientific literature on whether nonhuman animals dream is sparse. Despite thousands of studies on animals and sleep, it’s been left to the side whether nonhuman animals experience the same kind of dream states that humans do—where we lose our teeth, miss a high school exam despite being an adult, or see surreal combinations of people and places.
Since animals can’t describe what went on in their minds after they wake up, scientists have been wary of speculating about the nature of their unconscious, said the philosopher David Peña-Guzmán, an associate professor of humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco State University.
In a new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, Peña-Guzmán pushes back against this instinct. He argues that there is enough evidence on nonhuman animal sleep to claim that yes, animals do dream—and this claim raises many interesting philosophical and moral questions that are worth exploring, starting with wondering why there’s been a reluctance to say that animals can dream like we can.
It’s only very recently that the topic is being broached at all. The first modern science paper on animal dreaming was published in 2020, in the Journal of Comparative Neurology. With the title, “Do All Mammals Dream?,” it was the first contemporary use of the terms “dream” and “dreaming” to refer directly to animals other than humans.
Motherboard talked with Peña-Guzmán about what convinced him that animals can dream, animal nightmares and sleep talking, and what animal dreaming implies about the obligations we have to animals.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Motherboard: It was striking to read that the first scientific article explicitly about dreaming in animals was published so recently—in 2020.
David Peña-Guzmán: A second one just came out a couple of months ago after my book was already in print. It’s only very, very recently that people are putting these things together, at least in the 20th and 21st century.
Motherboard: But there is a longer history of people wondering whether animals dream or not, what are some of those earlier examples?
The most famous character here is [Charles] Darwin, who writes about the dreams of animals in The Descent of Man, which came out in 1871. By the time that book came out, of course, Darwin had already published On The Origin of Species and had created a major upheaval in Europe, and really all over the world, with the theory of evolution.
SF Source Vice Jun 2022