Do Cats Have Nightmares? (Answered!)

I was watching my cat taking a nap the other day and he seemed so peaceful for so long.

They sleep as much as 16 hours a day, so I’m used to watching them when they sleep and seeing their behavior.

The other day, though, as I was watching him in a deep sleep on the windowsill in a sunspot, I noticed he began twitching and moving his legs, even mothing his mouth around at times and slightly baring his teeth.

I was a bit confused by this, so I wondered if he was having a nightmare.

We can say with a degree of confidence that cats have dreams.

Many animals appear to dream, and cats are no exception.

They are highly active when asleep, and equally in certain cycles of sleep in the same way we are.

Let’s look further into this.

Do cats dream?

Definitively, we cannot say for certain.

All signs seem to suggest that they do dream in some way or another.

Our dreams are at their most intense during our REM cycle, or rapid eye movement.

Cats also have this cycle, so it seems a natural hypothesis that they dream as well.

A study in the 1960s demonstrated the levels of brain activity in cats when they slept and demonstrated that there are cycles of sleep that cats go through just as we do.

Again, though, this doesn’t definitively point to dreams—it just heavily suggests it.

It seems as though the amount of REM sleep that punctuates a cat’s sleep cycle decreases with age—in other words, kittens are perhaps more likely to dream than older kittens.

This could be to do with the idea that dreams are a sort of hypothetical scenario that the brain runs to gather information on how to respond to certain threats.

Kittens have a deal more to learn about the world, and their dreams support this.

Studies have even suggested that cats are able to dream about events from the distant past, though most of their dreams are made up of events from that day or very recent memory.

So what about nightmares, then?

Do cats have bad dreams?

If we can only say with some degree of surety that cats dream at all, you can expect how difficult it might be to definitively say if there is a dichotomy between good and bad dreams.

The best evidence we have is unfortunately anecdotal, but such evidence carries a lot more weight when it comes to pets.

Many do report their cats jolting awake, wide eyed with ears pulled back, as if frightened.

This seems to be a good sign that they are having some form of nightmare.

If your cat seems to be very anxious after waking up, there are many ways you can spot and mitigate this anxiety.

If cats can have dreams, it seems natural to suppose they do have nightmares—but we don’t have definitive, empirical evidence to substantiate this claim.

Can cats get night terrors?

Our definition of night terrors really only applies to a very specific condition found mostly in human children.

It involves almost a waking nightmare, in which the person hallucinates as if they were dreaming, almost always in a deeply unpleasant way.

Cats could not really communicate this experience if they did have it, though they do demonstrate erratic behavior after waking up, for example.

This could potentially indicate some kind of lingering imagery from the dream that continues to unsettle them.

As we would define them, though, cats cannot really get night terrors.

Should I wake my cat from a nightmare?

It depends, really. If your cat seems in a lot of distress and is making a lot of jerky movements, then it may well be a good idea to gently wake the cat up.

Very gently is they key, though, otherwise they will probably be even more afraid when they wake up.

If it’s only mild or your cat is just twitching a bit, you’re probably find to just let it sleep.

So, the only definitive answer is that we unfortunately don’t know.

Cats plainly dream to some degree and in some capacity.

The nature, intensity, complexity and vividness of these dreams is, by current methods, simply impossible to determine.

We might determine something about their responses to these dreams by uneasy sleeping patterns, but we still can’t for sure say that cats are having ‘nightmares’.

Dreams are hard enough to decipher when we have them—let alone when cats do.

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