SLUMBERING cats really do dream about the mice they’ve just chased around the
garden, new research suggests. It seems that like people, animals have complex
dreams that reactivate experiences from earlier in the day.
“One theory is that dreams provide the opportunity to bring together
experiences that were related but did not occur at the same time, in order to
learn from them,” says Matthew Wilson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This work demonstrates that animals are capable of re-evaluating their
experiences when they are not in the midst of them.”
Animals have similar sleep patterns to humans. Both involve…
