About the book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David M. Peña-Guzmán, published by Princeton University Press.
In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle labeled sleep “a border-land between living and not living.” For the father of virtue ethics, to go to sleep—as we all do nightly with almost-clocklike regularity—is to step into a metaphysically ambiguous realm that is flanked by the dynamism of life on one side and the stillness of death on the other. “A person who is asleep,” he writes in On the Generation of Animals, “would appear to be neither completely non-existent nor completely existent—for, of course, it is to the waking state par excellence that life pertains.”
Ancient though it may be, this Aristotelian insight sounds sensible even to modern ears. When we sleep, we are not really—or, rather, not fully—alive. Our senses are dulled. Our bodies are limp. And the cord tethering us to reality seems to be cut at the source. Yet, it’s obvious that we aren’t dead either. We breathe. We move. And, perhaps most importantly, we dream.
I hope to show that animals’ exclusion from our moral and legal culture is more than just an unlucky circumstance or unhappy accident of history.
And, as Aristotle himself understood, dreaming is a clear sign of not just life, but of mental motion. It is a clear sign that, even in the blackness of sleep, our minds are spinning their wheels under even the most unexpected of circumstances. Paradoxically, dreams are what happens when our minds “awaken” while our bodies slumber.
The Philosophical Puzzle of Dreams
For millennia, this paradox has fascinated philosophers and scholars, many of whom have come to see dreaming as a clue, perhaps even “the” clue, to the mystery of the human mind.
What must the human mind be such that it can venture into this “border-line between living and not living” without vanishing into thin air? How does it manage to generate images, feelings, and sensations from within itself even after its bond to the external world has been compromised by the power of sleep?
Baked into this intrigue, of course, is a good deal of human exceptionalism. If dreams hold the key to the human psyche, we often think, this must be because the human psyche itself holds the key to dreams. Humans, as the philosopher George Santayana once said, can be defined as “the dreaming animal.”
This is the assumption I set out to disband in my book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (2022), at whose core we find the idea that dreaming is an animal (rather than human) capacity.
This regular and ordinary feature of animal life, I suggest, poses a formidable challenge to the logic of human exceptionalism that has colored our understanding of the more-than-human world, and summons us to reconsider what we think we know about the lives and minds of other sentient lifeforms.
Animal Dreams
When Animals Dream welcomes readers into the uncanny world of nonhuman dreaming by showing that there are dreamers on practically every branch of the tree of life. From apes to birds and from fish to cephalopods, plenty of nonhumans experience those fantastical visions that have been objects of human curiosity since the dawn of recorded history.
Of course, the fact that many animals dream does not mean that they all dream the same things or dream in the same manner. On the contrary, there are likely to be as many dreamworlds as there are dreamers in the universe since the dream experiences of a given animal will reflect that specific animal’s “form” (where “form” is shorthand for all the morphological, perceptual, cognitive, and social variables that shape an organism’s life and experience).
Dogs, for instance, dream dog-dreams, i.e., dreams comprised of the types of sensations, feelings, and ideas dogs have available to them by virtue of being dogs. And the same thing is true of cats, horses, octopuses, parrots, and so on. Consequently, when thinking about the dreams of other animals, we have to respect these differences and remind ourselves that our human style of dreaming is only one among many. This style reflects our form, which is no less peculiar and provincial than those of all other creatures who dream.
Dreams as Evidence of Emotion
Independently of how particular animals dream, the mere fact that they dream is a testament to the complexity of their emotional lives. We have known since the 1970s that the dreams of humans are inherently emotional given that the limbic system plays a key role in the process of dream formation, and given the emotional toll they often take on us. Might the same be said of the dreams of other animals? Might they also be evidence that animals experience emotional states, including states we have historically reserved for members of our species?
By now, research in ethology and affective neuroscience has established that plenty of animals experience states such as joy, happiness, rage, sadness, and fear while awake. What my work shows, however, is that they also experience them while asleep. Rats, for example, dream of things that are emotionally tinged, independently of whether the “tinge” in question is positive or negative. Make rats stare at a delicious but inaccessible plate of food for a long period of time and then let them to take a nap, and those rats will dream of getting their paws on the yummy reward. They will dream of satisfying a desire that wasn’t fulfilled in the real world.
Conversely, subject those same rats to sustained physical or psychological trauma, and they will succumb to chronic nightmares for weeks, if not months. It seems, then, that rats can have positively and negatively charged dreams, which is proof enough that they are emotional beings through and through. This refutes the philosophical caricature of the “animal machine,” which portrays nonhumans as machinic contraptions devoid of thought and feeling.
Dreams and Imagination
Just as dreams bring into relief the emotions of nonhumans, they reveal the latter’s ability to imagine. Imagination is a complicated mental function without a designated lair in the brain. It engaged multiple brain areas and is intricately connected to curiosity, emotion, and our sense of time.
I’ve had to confront head-on many of the philosophical conundrums that always haunt the study of animals.
Dreams are, by definition, acts of imagination that occur during sleep. They are fantasies, creations, or inventions of the sleeping mind.
This means that as soon as we concede that a particular animal has the capacity to dream, we admit that said animal is capable of thinking about—or, as philosophers would say, “intending”—things that are either “not present” or “not real.”
This yields a vision of animals as mentally free since thinking about what is absent or irreal means thinking against reality. It means defying the real by leaping from actuality to possibility, fact to fiction.
Rethinking Animals
In writing this book, I’ve had to confront head-on many of the philosophical conundrums that always haunt the study of animals, including “the problem of other minds” (Can we know what goes on inside the mind of a nonhuman Other?), “the problem of language” (Can we ascertain the meaning of animal behavior in the absence of a shared language?), and “the problem of anthropomorphism”(Aren’t we just projecting human qualities onto nonhuman creatures when we study them?).
Who is a member of our moral and legal universe, and why?
While these conundrums are real and should make us think carefully about the claims we make about other living beings, I argue that they should not keep us from trying to make sense of the experience of other creatures or from actively resisting the logic of human exceptionalism that has governed human-animal relations for centuries.
And since this logic is a structural feature of our history and culture, resisting it requires more than a shift in individual attitudes. It requires structural change, especially change in the moral and legal frameworks mediate our relations with the more-than-human world. This is why after discussing these philosophical conundrums, I turn to the ethical question of what my discoveries about the dreams of animals tell us about our moral and legal obligations toward other species.
The Moral and Legal Exclusion of Animals
In moral and legal theory, one of the central problems is the issue of membership. Who is a member of our moral and legal universe, and why? It is obvious that animals are currently not members of this universe since we do not recognize them as our moral or legal equals. Quite the opposite, we harm them; we reduce them to commodities to be bought and traded; and we treat their lives as means to our (often superficial) ends. We do this because animals—as a group—are excluded from our culture’s sphere of moral and legal concern. They lack moral and legal “status.”
This situation, of course, could be remedied by granting them this status and incorporating them into the fabric of our moral and legal worlds. But this raises a tricky theoretical question, which is: On what grounds is moral and legal status granted? What principle or rule do we use to decide which entities to “let in”?
Surely, we don’t want to grant moral or legal status to inanimate objects such as tables and chairs. And surely, we do want to grant it to living humans. But between “inanimate objects” and “living humans” there is a large gray zone where we don’t know how to proceed. In this zone we find fungi, plants, and, of course, animals. Of these, which should have standing under morality and law?
Dreaming as a Basis for Moral and Legal Status
In When Animals Dream, I use dreaming to make a case for the inclusion of animals (leaving the issue of fungi and plants for another day). And the case I make hinges on two theoretical claims.
- The first is the general principle that status should be granted to all entities endowed with what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness,” a type of consciousness rooted in feeling, affect, and embodiment.
- The second is the claim that dreaming entails this type of consciousness such that any creature who dreams is necessarily phenomenally conscious. Together, these claims lead to the conclusion that all dreamers should be treated as a member of our moral and legal community independently of species membership.
In making this case, I hope to show that animals’ exclusion from our moral and legal culture is more than just an unlucky circumstance or unhappy accident of history. It is a perversion of ethics and justice that will be corrected only when animals are transformed (not just “in our minds,” but “in the world”) from mere biological entities that live, move, and perish, to fully-fledged ethico-legal subjects with a legitimate claim to moral and legal rights.
