you can tell someone is lucid based upon EEG activitty though, can’t you?
Wouldn’t you be able to tell if animals got lucid, then? And asking a monkey about its dreams through sign language would be very interesting. If it could understand what you meant by dreams. you might have to wake it up during REM and tell it everything it was just experiencing is called a “dream”
The problem with EEGs and things is that, we don’t truely understand the human brain, let alone other animals.
The advantage of the human brain is that you can wake the subject up and ask: were you dreaming? were you lucid? Then correlate their answers with the data on the EEG gave them.
Animals likely don’t function the same way brainwave wise and without the ability to ask questions and correlate data that way, we’ll never truely know what the EEG readings mean.
I wish someone would invent a dream recorder so we can watch them back, and even what our pets dreams that’d be a laugh
Yeah, like the experiment where laberge had the subject move his eyes left to right repeatedly when he became lucid. Thats what proved lucidity was real. They would probably have to map whats going on in the lucid brain and maybe by luck they might catch this in an animal.
Maybe you could ask the monkey in sign language to please move their eyes back and fourth the same way. That would save trying to decipher any brainwaves or anything like that, and I’m sure if the chimp understood what lucid dreaming was, it would understand the eye movement signal.
My dog whimpers in his sleep and kinda twitches. We always say he’s having a doggy dream/nightmare… Although I don’t really know if an animal can LD. I think I’ll fence sit and stay undecided
But the dog doesn’t have to question his life, he just has to know where he is. A dog knows when it’s awake (pobviously) so I don’t see why it couldn’t be aware of a dream (as long as it could remember it’s dreams…which evidence suggests they can’t)
A dog doesn’t know what or why when it comes to night and day, but I’m sure it can percieve a difference. Besides, I only said it would be possible if the dog remembered it’s dreams, which is unlikely, because mammals have a natural amnesia that blocks dream recall.
Nobody considered that it is widely assumed (though it cannot be proven) that most to all animals do not have consciousness and do not have psychical sensations.
Animals don’t know they exist. They don’t even recognize themseleves in mirrors, how could they do it in dreams? They are merely machines but they don’t know they are. They have input and output but it is not essential for their survival to know that they exist. It’s only essential to do the input/output thing. In fact consciousness would be counter-productive (it is for most humans anyway)
What about primates? If it’s possible to teach a chimp sign language, is it possible to ask if they dream? And since a chimp can recognise that the mirror reflection is itself but not the “real”self trapped behind the glass, is it possible for them to distinguish between a dream and real life?
Yes I guess primates can distinguish dream and reality while they don’t understand why they both exist. Other animals are more like children who don’t know the difference at all (I’d assume that animals act exactly the same way in dreams as they do in waking life).
However, I don’t know if chimps can learn lucid dreaming (or have lucid dreams). From the brain structure it could be possible but it would be extremely rare. It’s rare among humans, and even those who master it aren’t always lucid. I doubt that primate information transimssion methods are developed enough to tell others if they had a lucid dreams and therefore spread it. I also don’t know how many of their dreams they remember. Many humans don’t remember dreams well, and for chimps it’s even less important to remember them. First, chimps are less complex, and second, dreams as such fulfill their biological function without being remembered anyway.
I think that it would be possible to find out if they have lucid dreams. A research was made by the lucidity institute to see if the brain patterns would be different in LD’s and they were indeed different so I think the reason that we have no idea wether animals have LD’s or not is because no one has done research to find it out. I would also like to say that i don’t think that we could say surely if animals know that they exist or not or if they are as dumb as we think because we cannot know what they are thinking