aggle-rithm
Ardent Formulist
My dog Shiner has exhibited some unusual behavior lately. He sometimes sleeps on our bed, and my wife has told me several times that he approaches her in the middle of the night, shaking like a leaf. I assumed that he was merely panting, and that's what she was feeling.
However, the other night he came crawling up to me in the middle of the night, and he was indeed shivering violently, as if he were very cold or very frightened. It wasn't cold at all that night, but I pulled him over close to me to try and warm him up. Eventually, the shivering became less frequent and stopped.
There was no external stimuli that could have caused this reaction, as far as I could tell. I considered the possibility that he might be having a seizure, but I've had dogs with seizure problems, and they usually don't have enough motor control during these episodes to come crawling over looking for comfort. It then occurred to me that he might be having nightmares.
Everything I've learned about sleep and dreaming leads me to believe that the physiological mechanism of dreaming for dogs is essentially the same as with humans, although the subjective experience might be different. Their dreams may not have the symbolic elements we are so used to, but it's likely that they can be scared by their own brains just like we can.
My belief about nightmares is that it's not about scary images; rather, the scary images are a by-product of a hyper-activation of the fight-flight centers in the brain. We have this surge of fear and impending disaster, and our brains come up with something scary to justify the response -- even though it's not really a response to anything, but a physiological sleep disturbance.
(I came to this conclusion, in part, by the observation that many of the scary images in my nightmares aren't inherently scary, especially in the childhood nightmares I remember.)
So, even if dogs lack the ability to construct a scary image to go along with the out-of-control fight-flight response, they would still be vulnerable to the same sort of sleep disturbance that causes our nightmares. They would simply wake with a nameless fear of danger.
(I realize a lot of this is belief not solidly backed up by science, but our understanding of dreaming still has a lot of gaps to fill, so I try to come up with an explanation that makes sense to me.)
If anyone else has a plausible explanation for Shiner's behavior, I'd love to hear it.
However, the other night he came crawling up to me in the middle of the night, and he was indeed shivering violently, as if he were very cold or very frightened. It wasn't cold at all that night, but I pulled him over close to me to try and warm him up. Eventually, the shivering became less frequent and stopped.
There was no external stimuli that could have caused this reaction, as far as I could tell. I considered the possibility that he might be having a seizure, but I've had dogs with seizure problems, and they usually don't have enough motor control during these episodes to come crawling over looking for comfort. It then occurred to me that he might be having nightmares.
Everything I've learned about sleep and dreaming leads me to believe that the physiological mechanism of dreaming for dogs is essentially the same as with humans, although the subjective experience might be different. Their dreams may not have the symbolic elements we are so used to, but it's likely that they can be scared by their own brains just like we can.
My belief about nightmares is that it's not about scary images; rather, the scary images are a by-product of a hyper-activation of the fight-flight centers in the brain. We have this surge of fear and impending disaster, and our brains come up with something scary to justify the response -- even though it's not really a response to anything, but a physiological sleep disturbance.
(I came to this conclusion, in part, by the observation that many of the scary images in my nightmares aren't inherently scary, especially in the childhood nightmares I remember.)
So, even if dogs lack the ability to construct a scary image to go along with the out-of-control fight-flight response, they would still be vulnerable to the same sort of sleep disturbance that causes our nightmares. They would simply wake with a nameless fear of danger.
(I realize a lot of this is belief not solidly backed up by science, but our understanding of dreaming still has a lot of gaps to fill, so I try to come up with an explanation that makes sense to me.)
If anyone else has a plausible explanation for Shiner's behavior, I'd love to hear it.
