Does your cat dream about canned sardines?

Rivers of ink have been spilled over dreams and we still don't know what they mean, if they mean anything.

Perhaps they are distorted reflections of reality, or a window into the activity of the subconscious.

Of course, there are also and always have been those who consider them premonitory messages, although that neither has empirical support nor does it seem the slightest to be true.

The quackery on the subject was already burdensome even before Freud, and later inspired visionary artists such as Salvador Dalí or Alfred Hitchcock for its immense power of plastic and narrative seduction.

In academic fields there has never been a lack of hypotheses.

One maintains that dreams do not reflect the experience of the day, but rather what the day has lacked, as if trying to compensate for the shortcomings of real life.

Dreams would fulfill the same role there as novels, only personalized for each reader.

Neuroscientists Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that the brain unlearns during sleep the binge of data it has binged on during the day, and that dreams represent all that irrelevant information that is going down the tube.

And of course we have the most disturbing idea of ​​all, whose epitome may be Calderón's

Life is a Dream

.

If dreams are hallucinations, what guarantees that our conscious experience is not another hallucination?

“It is obviously possible,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “that what we call waking is nothing more than an unusual and persistent nightmare;

"I don't think I'm dreaming right now, but I can't prove it."

You know what philosophers are like.

I wonder what Russell would dream about.

But I promised to talk about your cat, and I'm not doing it.

Yes, dogs and cats dream, judging by their rapid eye movements (

REM

) while they sleep, which are the hallmark of our REM sleep, dream sleep.

According to psychologist Deirdre Barrett of Harvard University, there is very little doubt that dogs and cats have some type of cognitive activity that is very similar to our dreams.

But what do they dream about?

There are indirect hints that the content of your dreams reflects your daily activity, such as running, eating, corralling prey, or sunbathing, but no one really knows.

Dreams are one of those things that are studied worse in animals than in people, because they can at least tell what they were dreaming about.

Brain imaging techniques are still far from resolving this issue.

Evolutionary reasoning, however, leads us to a safe conclusion.

If we share dream activity with dogs, cats and many other animals, it means that dreams have persisted for tens or hundreds of millions of years on this harsh planet.

Biologists know that if something lasts so long on this harsh planet, it must be very important.

When something is of little use, natural selection destroys it without the slightest scruple.

It is “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said.

So what are dreams for?

The sharpest idea I know of is from neuroscientists Don Vaughn and David Eagleman.

Our dreams are mostly visual, with little olfactory or auditory content.

And visual, auditory, olfactory, and other brain areas compete incessantly with each other for territory.

The planet has been alternating between day and night for 4.5 billion years, so all living beings have evolved in that context.

And at night information continues to enter through all sensory channels except the visual one.

So we dream so that the visual areas are occupied at night and are not invaded by the others.

It's just an idea, but a good one.

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