Belief in animal dreams was prevalent at the height of the Victorian age. Among the scientists of the time, this interest revealed itself as a basic openness to a wide variety of claims– some more empirically grounded than others– about animal experience, consisting of claims about what occurs to animals when they sleep. Due to numerous advancements, specifically the rise of behaviorist psychology, what started in the 1870s as a wave of support for the complexity of animals minds morphed over the period of only a few years into a pervasive apprehension about animal cognition of any kind. By the 1930s, many of the topics that had galvanized nineteenth century biologists– animal thinking, animal language, animal emotions, animal play, and, of course, animal dreaming– had fallen into scientific ill repute, and most of them stayed there for a long time.
Belief in animal dreams was prevalent at the height of the Victorian era. The antivivisection motion was gaining steam in Europe and North America, and public attitudes about the status of animals were changing quickly. In this environment, the conditions were ripe for increased interest in the psychological and psychological lives of animals. Amongst the researchers of the time, this interest revealed itself as a basic openness to a wide array of claims– some more empirically grounded than others– about animal experience, consisting of claims about what occurs to animals when they sleep. This belief was so extensive that Darwins protege, the evolutionary biologist George Romanes, mentioned Lindsays theory of animal dreams enthusiastically in his 1883 work of art Mental Evolution in Animals.In this book, which was checked out with gusto by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Romanes went further than Lindsay in asserting that dreaming shows that animals are endowed with the professors that the German moralist Immanuel Kant had actually unconditionally rejected them only a century previously: the faculty of creativity. Dreaming proves that animals have what Romanes dubs “creativity in the 3rd degree,” which allows animals to form psychological images “independently of any obvious recommendations from without.” In Romaness view, the same mental operations are required to dream of something regarding visually picture it given that, in both cases, the mind directs itself toward something missing and relates to it as if it existed. Dreaming, he concludes, “constitutes particular evidence of creativity belonging to […] the 3rd degree.” In holding this view, the biologist from Kingston, Ontario, was not challenging the spirit of his time– he was directing it.In 1888, only 5 years after the publication of Mental Evolution in Animals, the popular publication The Century ran a post about the science of dreams, problems, and somnambulism that consisted of a section on animal dreams. Among the specialists discussed as protectors of an interspecies theory of dreams were lesser-known figures such as William Lindsay and Georges Romanes, along with such stars as Charles Darwin. A year later, the Canadian biologist Wesley Mills published his critical Textbook of Animal Physiology, that included a lengthy discussion of the imagine animals, specifically pet dogs. That exact same year, the French psychologist Alfred Binet, creator of IQ screening, examined several books on dreaming in the journal The Psychological Year [LAnnée Psychologique], consisting of the Italian psychologist Sante De Sanctiss book Dreams: Psychological and Clinical Studies [I sogni: Studi Psicologici e Clinici], which dedicated an entire chapter to interviews De Sanctis carried out with breeders, farmers, hunters, and circus trainers about the dreams of “superior animals” such as pets, horses, and birds.Animal dreams may have been deeply implanted in the scientific and cultural imaginaries of the nineteenth century, but the tide eventually turned. Due to a number of advancements, particularly the increase of behaviorist psychology, what started in the 1870s as a wave of support for the intricacy of animals minds changed over the span of just a few years into a prevalent hesitation about animal cognition of any kind. After the millenium, the life sciences adopted a brand-new attitude– a cooler, more distant attitude– that led new generations of researchers to distance themselves from their predecessors and to implicate them of predicting human capabilities onto animals. By the 1930s, numerous of the topics that had galvanized 19th century biologists– animal thinking, animal language, animal emotions, animal play, and, obviously, animal dreaming– had actually fallen under scientific ill prominence, and the majority of them stayed there for a long period of time. I call the period extending from the 1900s to the 1980s “the silent century” because, throughout this time, conversations of animal consciousness came to a standstill from which our scientific culture is still trying to break free.Text from When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David M. Peña-Guzmán. Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.