Do animals, like humans, also dream?

The woman was neither running nor flying as her feet hardly touched the ground on that winding road covered on both sides by thick vegetation. With a quick turn of her head she sees that the pursuer, knife in hand, is much closer, almost on top of her. Suddenly, something saves her: the awakening.

Who at least once in their life has not had a horrible nightmare like this and then forgets it in a matter of minutes? It’s because dreaming is an activity of the human brain that unconsciously reproduces certain situations otherwise impossible to live.

Scientists hold that people spend more than six years of their lives dreaming, and many a few wonder whether animals can dream too. As early as in 343 BC, Aristotle stated in his treatise History of Animals, that a good part of them seemed to dream.

Digital publications have it that, although at that time there were no proper tools to prove it, with the passage of time many people have come to agree with him, as some scholars and pet owners claim to have observed dogs and cats stirring and moving in their sleep, as if they were staging their own dream. Most mammals are said to experience the REM—rapid eye movement—phase of sleep, when dreaming is more frequent and intense, which suggests that they also do.

Researchers who have conducted studies involving rats trying to find their way out of a maze remark that their neuronal patterns of activity were identical when the rodents were sleeping.

After conducting experiments, scientists from the University of British Columbia claim that dogs go through the same stages of sleep as humans, except faster, and on average they start dreaming 20 minutes after falling asleep. The bigger dogs tend to have longer dreams than the small ones, but the latter have faster and more frequent dreams, they say.

And since brain activity can be as curious as it is complicated, after learning about expert research, I invite you, quoting [Cuban journalist and TV host] Taladrid, to draw your own conclusions.