Animal Dreams

Transcript

Welcome to Dream Auguries. Tonight we're calling this Episode:  Animal Dreams 

Specifically, we're focusing on the dreams of the Cuttlefish. That's C-U-T-T-L-E-fish. (You can see a few pictures of them on our website.)

According to a 2012 study in the scientific journal, PLoS One, researchers wrote: 

“[C]uttlefish exhibit a sleep-like state accompanied by color changes, twitching, and rapid eye movements similar to REM sleep.”

Scientists say that many animals likely experience some form of REM sleep.

The cousin of the cuttlefish, the octopus, may dream as well, but if they do, scientists say it is probably less than a minute -- when their skin may rapidly change color.

Dolphins -- on the other hand -- experience what is called "unihemispheric slow wave sleep" known as "deep sleep". When it is time to rest, a dolphin shuts down only one hemisphere of its brain (and closes the eye on the opposite side). In this way, the other half of the brain can monitor the environment for any threats from predators. It's not known if in this half waking state, dolphins truly dream.

But after seeing this close-up I may myself be dreaming of cuttlefish tonight. And I wonder: what a cuttlefish might be dreaming of – its next meal? a parade of enormous blue whales slowly swimming by, singing? Or is it imagining sights beyond the silvered underbelly of the wave above? 

Do dreams sometimes reveal creatures, architectures, landscapes that we have never seen while waking? That is, what if a dream is not simply a way of rearranging sensations from our waking life, but if it can reveal things we have yet to see with our eyes wide open? What if dreams open us to things our eyes have yet to – or cannot – see? Without the language of our waking day, how could we ever name these things?

It would be as if tonight, thirty feet below the ocean’s surface, this cuttlefish is stirred by a dream of you looking at its image frozen on a computer screen. But upon waking, the image dissolves like ink in water because there is no other referent for such a strange sight.

How many images from our collective unconscious dissolve like smoke behind our eyes just before we wake?

Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles and soothsayers, magicians and conjurors of all kinds. It's bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, now streaming on cable, written and directed by Hugh Schulze. And our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott-Green and sound design by Kevin O'Rourke.

Good night.