Paula Kirby, who likes dogs better than cats, nevertheless graciously called this to my attention. It certainly looks like the kitten’s having a bad dream:
Is this kitten dreaming? Perhaps. It’s well established that cats—and most mammals—show the REM (“rapid eye movement”) sleep that occurs during dreaming. But better evidence comes from old work reported in USA Today:
Older studies, done decades ago in cats, involved temporarily releasing the suppression of motor activity that happens during REM sleep so they’d act out their dreams.
What researchers witnessed is sleepwalking cats doing things they’d normally do while awake — walking, swatting their forepaws, even pouncing on imaginary prey.
That’s not absolute evidence of dreaming, of course, for it doesn’t let us into the cat’s brain; it could simply reflect sequences of motor patterns that are wired in its brain. But it’s certainly suggestive that some dreaming is going on.
But another site says this about those studies:
During sleep, our brain releases inhibiting substances to prevent us from acting out our dreams fully, although we may toss, turn and even talk in our sleep. The feline brain works similarly. In laboratory experiments where unfortunate feline subjects have had their brains tampered with so that those substances aren’t released, the cats act out their dreams in full. Even laboratory-bred cats which have never hunted, or even seen prey, have been observed to ‘catch birds’, ‘chase mice’ and ‘bat prey’ in the course of their dreams.
How can you envision in your dreams an experience you’ve never had? Is this a Jungian thing? Could it be that the neurological wiring that acts when a cat catches prey can also cause images to form in the brain? That seems doubtful, especially if a cat has never seen a bird or a mouse.
I dream that I am flying all the time. Yet, I am not superman.
That is because I have the power to project images into the brains of other people. You’re welcome.
This is one of my most recurrent dreams. “Will flying” is the name it goes by. I (in the dream) just decide to float up and move around at will.
Can this be used in an argument on one side or the other of the old free will debate?
It goes by the name “noclip”.
I’m too old to use such terms.
I glide through the air like a flying squirrel in my dreams, for some reason I can’t fly superman style.
I have to flap my arms quite hard and always think “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?”
It’s the lab’s description of the cats’ behavior as catching MICE and BIRDS. But it is obvious to anyone who has ever been around kittens that they respond instinctively to objects in motion. L
Is the kitten having nightmice?
Oh my, but I can report the same experiance with young puppies…
And when you sit there holding a little one, and the legs are “going” full speed and the soft barking, you can so easily picture him or her running over a field herding sheep… or god forbid, chasing a cat 😉
I dreamed last night that my cat told me about his last dream.
I will anecdotally attest to kitteh dreams. The most clear are the predation dreams. Small movements, vocalizations, etc. Sweet and hilarious.
Maybe they’d substitute something they had seen? I remember as a kid having frequent dreams involving a Tyrannosaurus Rex prowling around the house. Maybe it’s common for young mammals to dream about predators attacking the burrow, but in the absence of any actual predators in our neighbourhood, I dreamed up a dinosaur instead?
Sure. Maybe they’re dreaming about chasing laser-pointer dots and attacking feathers on a stick.
Pretty certain it’s final exams and they haven’t been to class all semester. And they aren’t wearing pants. But, sure, feathers…
Or rather, they are wearing pants. Nightmarish.
Last year I bottle-raised a kitten from one week to adulthood. It was very interesting to watch all the typical cat behaviors emerge, even without any mom-cat instruction or example to follow. Stalking, cleaning, litter pan use, etc. I had no idea the beasties were so thoroughly hard-wired.
Nightmares about squids and fuzzy faced hoomins for sure.
Jerry, what’s the matter? This kitten is simply responding to the archetype image of the shadow kitteh.
Anthropomorphism is definitely something we need to be on the watch for, but many people go too far in the opposite direction.
It looks like dreaming and has the same brain activity as dreaming. The most parsimonious explanation is that it’s dreaming.
yes, but what dream imagery does a kitten ‘see’ when it has not yet met prey?
“How can you envision in your dreams an experience you’ve never had?”
V S Ramachandran in his book ‘The Tell-Tale Brain’ talks about a colour blind synesthete who ‘sees’ coloured numbers even though his eyes lack the cones to see colour. His visual cortex is still wired for colour so he sees them.
In his book Cat Behavior: The Predatory and Social Behavior of Domestic and Wild Cats, ethologist Paul Leyhausen observed that cats have a set of nested instincts involved in their behavior towards prey. In otder, from strongest to weakest, are:
1. Stalk
2. Pounce
3. Catch
4. Hold
5. Kill
6. Eat
Common sense might tell you that “eat” might be the strongest instinct, but this heirarchy apparently exists because each of the lower-numbered activities must be accomplished in order to proceed to the next.
In a well-fed feline, such as the typical house cat, these instincts will fade in the order 6-5-4-3-2-1. This is why, for instance, a cat may “present” a dead prey animal – the instinct to kill was still there, but not to eat, so the prey is being shared with the social circle.
This is also why cats “play” with prey in a catch-and-release manner – the instinct to catch is still strong, but holding, killing and eating have retreated to the background.
Furthermore, this explains why cats are so “playful”; the instinct to stalk and pounce are the strongest and the last to go. Stalking behavior is, apparently, so strong that cats have been observed to stalk unseen prey in an empty room.
If we assume that cats experience somnambulistic states, it is also reasonable to posit that they will undertake behavior driven by strong instnct while in that state. As I write this, I can see one of my cats sleeping, but her dail and hind legs occasionally twitch – is she dreaming or are air currents making her jumpy? I am inclined to the former, because she also makes occasional swats with her left forepaw.
I definitely recommend reading Cat Behavior (originally published in Germany as Verhaltensstudien an Katzen), but it’s out of print and used copies are rare and expensive – at Amazon, the prices range from US $179.99 to $319.13, but any decent academic library should have one at QL737.C23 L4913.
My cat occasionally growls in her sleep with hackles visibly raised. That seems hard to explain as a purely involuntary motor reflex without some imaginary threat stimulus to trigger it.
“How can you envision in your dreams an experience you’ve never had?” I suppose they would still have the predispositions that would cause them to stalk prey if they ever saw some, and these inbuilt behaviors could be being triggered by whatever triggers our random dream stimuli.
“Could it be that the neurological wiring that acts when a cat catches prey can also cause images to form in the brain?” For me anyway, sometimes dreaming isn’t so visual or perception-based as it is simply knowing what’s happening in a more direct way. I often feel direct shifts in my dream knowledge without any intervening perception, and sometimes I suspect when I wake up and think I saw something in a dream that I could be rationalizing the otherwise inexplicable acquisition of knowledge by thinking I saw it, when it’s possible that I directly incorporated the change of state into my mental (dream) model without an intermediate act of perception.
To me an interesting question is how cats themselves experience their dreaming and wakefulness. I’ve woken cats from what I assume were bad dreams–they were growling and madly twitching paws, fur, and whiskers–and watched their eyes go from a startled and dilated state to an “oh, I know where I am now” state. So do they understand that there is a dream state that differs from an awake state and that what happens in a dream state isn’t real? (Of course, this raises the question what “understand” might even mean for a cat.)
(Warning! Wild speculation ahead!)
Curiously, one of the key differences between dreaming and waking in humans is the fact that when you’re awake, the difference between dreaming and waking is obvious, but when you’re dreaming, it’s not obvious. Dreamers often think they’re awake, and are wrong; people who are actually awake (and not on drugs) hardly ever think they’re dreaming.
This suggests to me that there’s a critical reality-checking faculty in our brains that’s (usually) disabled during dreaming, so that the disjointed dreamlike quality of the experience seems normal and natural. It’s (usually) only on waking that we can perceive dreams for what they are. (The exception is lucid dreaming, in which the reality-checker wakes up and recognizes the dream state without interrupting it.)
This also suggests a reason why dream sequences in movies and novels are often unsatisfying. If they’re dreamlike enough to be plausible as dreams, then the audience isn’t fooled into thinking they’re real, breaking immersion in the character’s experience. But if the dream sequence is realistic enough to fool the audience along with the character, then it feels like a cheat when the trick is revealed, since real dreams aren’t that coherent. (I never quite bought into the premise of Inception for exactly this reason; it portrayed dreaming as a kind of virtual reality, rather than as an altered state of consciousness.)
Anyway, the question you’re asking, as I see it, is whether cats have a similar sort of reality-checking faculty that enables them to distinguish dreaming from waking states. Is this faculty part of our deep inheritance from early mammals? Or is it a more recent evolutionary accretion along with language and long-range planning? I don’t have an answer, but I’m inclined toward the latter view.
In the real-world we don’t have to think about the floor holding us up, gravity keeping us down or walls being impenetrable – they’re physical constraints. In the dream world we’re loosed from these restrictions and stuff happens simply because there’s nothing to stop it.
We also have lots of sensory input in the waking state to confirm that shadows which trip our alert states are false-alarms. I suspect that when dreaming it’s simply the absence of more or less coordinated back-up checks that allows fantasy responses.
If your cat is lapping in its sleep, you can dribble drops of cold tea into the edge of its mouth, and it will avidly lap and drink, while remaining solidly asleep. Eventually they wake up, and are utterly bemused, licking their chops. You can see them thinking: “Thank Ceiling Cat, it was all a dream…. Wait a minute, what’s that taste?!”
“How can you envision in your dreams an experience you’ve never had?”
How can you envision such things when you’re awake? How did Frank Whittle ever come up with the jet engine?
For that mater, how could you explain the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror and GOP policy and platform statements?
Another anecdote. Several years ago our male cat had an encounter with a feral cat at our summer home. They had been hissing and growling at each other for several weeks when one night the feral cat came in through the screen. Our cat survived, we didn’t ask county animal control about the fate of the feral cat. Anyway, since then our cat has had what appear to be nightmares (very agitated sleep), but only at our summer home. Their frequency has also diminished over the years.
Am I being too anthropomorphic?
How did they get that data?
Vivisection, almost by definition. And I’ll leave it to people’s own imagination to work out the experimental details, bearing in mind the work was done decades ago.
There is some real murk behind some of these bland-sounding statements. And I hope that the perpetrators are still sleeping uneasily.
I think those particular cat experiments were done about 30 years ago. It wasn’t done for anyone’s amusement; those were attempts to identify parts of the mammalian brain responsible for various functions (with the obvious hope that human brains are homologous).
I’m perfectly well aware of what the justifications were. However there were strenuous efforts made to cover up the costs (in terms of pain and suffering – which itself suggests a guilty mind. And the extreme artificiality of the experimental conditions makes the validity of the conclusions at the very least dubious. The cost-benefit relation is by no means as clear cut as pro-vivisection people made out at the time.
(And before you go around hauling out the old canards, I’m perfectly content with using vivisection, where it’s effective and pretty-much unavoidable for high-value targets. Controlling TB being a case in point from the same era ; academic interest in brain function when we’ve still few tools for intervening … is much more debatable.
Damn it, did that reply post?
There is no such thing as a cat that has not hunted. I dispute any claim to the contrary.
Cats are picky about many things, but if a thing is a thing, it is also a prey.
My kittehs always dream. They meow and purr in their sleep. Sometimes they twitch or move all their legs as though they are running.
Dear old mother cat is doing exactly what cats do. They tense their arm muscles and hug. My cat Predicate (good name for a cat!) used to sleep under the duvet with me in the crook of my arm. When I moved she would curl her front paws around whatever part of me she was wrapped into anyway and just hug.
Sodium Silicate also slept in my bed with his head on the pillow next to mine and would turn over and throw his across my neck.
I suspect this behaviour is much like ours. If your sleeping companion moves, so do you and how you do it is up to what is happening in your own sleep patterns.
Cats dream as do we. As do dogs as Paula has seen with her Poppy. Cows don’t appear to dream – they breathe massively though – that I can attest to. I don’t know enough about horses but I am sure someone here can enlighten us:-)