The Real Reason Your Cat Is Twitching In Its Sleep

Publish date: 2024-05-09

A surprisingly exhaustive article by the Hill's Pet website argues that sleep twitching might be a symptom of REM sleep — the deep sleep stage where dreaming occurs. Looking at a cat utilizing its full repertoire of sleep twitches, odd vocalizations and stretches, it's indeed easy to accept the possibility that the feline forty winks in question might involve a dream or two. Besides, science confirmed way back in the 1960s that cats can indeed enter the REM stage, so there's that.

So, yeah, cats dream. As for what kinds of dreams they have, we're simply not sure. Thanks to scientific evidence of REM sleep in cats, such as a temporary, paralysis-like muscle tone loss known as atonia, we know that something is going on in their heads when they dream. Then again, as veterinary sleep researcher Dr. Adrian R. Morrison points out, we have a hard time knowing what cats think even when they're awake, so interpreting their dreams is a bit of a long shot. So, until science finally figures out how to pull one of those Inception-dream spy capers on a cat, we'll just go with the "total world domination" theory. 

    

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