Dreams of Animal - The Blind and Deaf - Criminals - Cripples - Drug Fiends - Feeble-Minded - Infanta and the Aged - Soldiers - Dreaming and Insanity - Dream States - Sleep Drunkenness.

It has been a debated question whether or not all animals dream. Older writers, as Aristotle, believed that dogs, horses, oxen, sheep, goats, and all viparous animals did so. Pliny corroborates this in his Natural History. As regards Pliny's History, it, also, may be regarded as a monument to the misapplication of industry and intellect; as one writer says, a better name for it would be Pliny's Unnatural History. While learned, this first century Roman was very gullible for he quotes, in addition to many other things, instances of elephants that would not go aboard a ship unless the keeper made oath that they would return again; he mentions a man who could see a distance of 125 miles; a dog that spoke; a serpent that barked; fishes that spoke and which came ashore at night to sleep, etc.

Darwin credits dogs, cats, horses, and the higher animals generally with dreaming; and, along with Cuvier and others, believes that birds dream. Doubtless there are some forms of life which have such a small amount of intelligence that whatever mental activity may go on in sleep must be very fragmentary and hardly deserving of the name of dreaming. Everyday observation should be sufficient to show us that common animals, as the dog and the cat, dream; we can often note them making movements with their paws while asleep; also emitting guttural sounds. Considering their usual pursuits, and their limited intelligence, their dreams are probably concerned with the gratification of the pleasurable instincts, the pursuit of prey, and the escape from enemies.

In connection with the dreams of animals, Macnish1 says:

"Man is not the only animal subject to dreaming. We have every reason to believe that many of the lower animals do the same. Horses neigh and rear, and dogs bark and growl in their sleep. Probably, at such times, the remembrance of the chase or combat was passing through the minds of these creatures; and they also not infrequently manifest signs of fear, joy, playfulness, and almost every other passion. Ruminating animals, such as the sheep and cow, dream less; but even they are sometimes so affected, especially at the time of rearing their young. The parrot is said to dream, and I should suppose that some other birds do the same. Indeed the more intellectual the animal is, the more likely is it to be subject to dreaming. Whether fishes dream it is impossible to conjecture; nor can it be guessed, with anything like certainty, at what point in the scale of animal intellect, the capability of dreaming ceases, although it is very certain there is such a point. I apprehend that dreaming is a much more general law than is commonly supposed, and that many animals dream which are never suspected of doing so."

1 Op. cit., pp. 9-10.