One day in the fall of 2020, Daniella Ressler I drove home with a car full of jumping spiders. Her lab was closed due to COVID-19 restrictions, so Rosler had no choice but to take the specimens home after spending the day corralling them in a dry field. That night, when she happened to check on them, the spiders hanging and not moving “I’ve never seen this before,” says Rosler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She immediately returned to the scene with her colleagues. “We started photographing them just out of curiosity,” she says.
They observed the same behavior, but only at night. Even stranger, a few months later, close monitoring of the lab using a night vision camera revealed that there wasn’t just a spider present. He was twitching slightly, but his eyes were moving.. This is similar to what happens when humans dream, and creates an irresistible expectation that spiders are dreaming too.
Jumping spiders aren’t the only non-human animal in which evidence of dream states has recently been discovered. Signs of dreams, and even nightmares, can be found in every species of the animal kingdom, from pigeons to octopuses. “Once you understand the functions involved in dreaming, it makes perfect sense that animals dream,” Ressler says. But still, questions remain. Do other animals dream like us, and if so, what are they dreaming about? This is not easy to understand, but it is worth doing, as it may help us understand the purpose of human dreams.
Source: www.newscientist.com
