Originally posted by kafine


I don't know if pets can have very bad dreams... They don't have the same kind of subconcious as humans. They might dream about having to defend their territory or that a possible predator is chasing them, but I doubt if they actually have any deep psychological \"nightmares\". *
Well I've got four dogs so I'm pretty well versed in this. We treat our dogs great, and they have a happy home to live in with us. we've never abused or mistreated our dogs, but each of my dogs comes from a different background and I find the coincidences disturbing.

One dog, I got when he was three months old. My roomate brought him home. The previous owner was going to take him to the pound and left him in the back yard for days, maybe weeks at a time. I cannot say if they beat him or not, but when we got him his stomach was swollen from lack of food. After a few days of regular eating, the swelling in his stomach subsided and he was a relatively normal puppy--He has some nightmares occasionally and if he begins to whimper in his sleep or something, I just wake him up and he's fine.

The other dog that I have, is an 80lb pure bread pit bull that my GF got from a shelter. He was being trained to fight, or had started being trained from various clues we've seen and we know he wasn't treated very well at all. We're guessing that he was probably discarded because although he's big and strong, he's just too gentle to be a fighting dog. I don't know exactly what these monsters do to these poor dogs to "train" them, but I can only guess what he's been through--I'll tell you this dog has nightmares like nothing I've ever seen before. He'll cry and howl so loud that it will wake us up from sleeping in the next room over. His legs flicker in place and his breathing gets heavy. His whole body shakes and twitches, almost like a convulsion and he howls like he's terrified, or been shot, or something horrible like that. We usually have to rush over to wake him up because he doesn't always respond when we call his name to wake him. Sometimes it takes 2-3 trys before he falls asleep again comfortably. He usually sneaks into bed with us and even though he's a big as a moose, we don't have the heart to tell him no because we know how bad his dreams get.

The other two dogs that we have: One we got from a licensed breeder when she was five weeks old. And the fourth is her daughter so we've basically had them since birth.

As I mentioned before, we try to provide a great home for all our our dogs and they get plenty of love and attention from us. The thing is that the two dogs we've had since birth never have any nightmares. Only the ones that had it rough when they were puppies, have nightmares.

So I believe their dreams are similiar to ours in the sense that it's derived from experiences and memories.