Why Does My Dog Bark in His Sleep? Inside Doggy Dreams

A dog barking, whimpering, twitching or paddling in its sleep is doing something almost every dog owner has witnessed, and it is nearly always normal. The value in understanding it is knowing the one thing you should not do, and the small set of signs that mean it is not sleep at all.

Dogs have REM sleep

Dogs cycle through sleep stages much as we do, including REM — the phase associated with dreaming. During REM, brain activity is high while most voluntary muscle activity is suppressed.

That suppression is incomplete. What leaks through produces exactly the pattern owners describe: twitching paws, running motions, muffled barks, whimpers, and rapid eye movement visible under closed lids. The dog is not distressed and is not awake.

Puppies and elderly dogs do it more, which fits the general pattern of REM occupying a larger share of sleep at both ends of life.

Are they dreaming?

Almost certainly something like it, though it is worth being careful here. The physiological evidence for REM sleep in dogs is solid; the leap to 'your dog is dreaming about chasing rabbits' is interpretation rather than finding.

What can reasonably be said is that dogs show the sleep architecture associated with dreaming in other mammals, and that the movements often resemble waking behaviours. Whether the subjective experience resembles ours is not something the evidence settles, and articles that describe the content of your dog's dreams are writing fiction.

The one rule

The old advice to let sleeping dogs lie is, unusually for folk wisdom, well founded. There is no benefit to interrupting, and a real cost if it goes wrong.

Sleep behaviour versus a seizure

This is the distinction worth being able to make, because it changes what you do next.

Normal sleep activity is loose and intermittent. The twitching comes and goes, the body stays relatively soft, breathing is regular between bursts, and the dog wakes normally and is immediately oriented — it looks at you, gets up, behaves as usual.

A seizure looks different. The body goes rigid rather than loose, movements are sustained and rhythmic rather than intermittent, there may be heavy salivation, urination or defecation, and — the key sign — the dog cannot be roused during it. Afterwards it may be disoriented, restless, pacing or temporarily blind for minutes to hours.

The other causes of night noise

• Cognitive dysfunction in older dogs. Disrupted sleep-wake cycles, night-time vocalising and disorientation often appear together, and this version involves the dog being awake rather than dreaming.
• Pain. Dogs in pain are restless at night, reposition repeatedly and may vocalise. Night is when discomfort dominates because there is nothing else to attend to.
• Breathing difficulty. In flat-faced breeds especially, noisy sleep can be obstructed breathing rather than dreaming, and that is worth distinguishing.
• Anxiety. A dog that vocalises while lightly dozing and is easily roused may not be in REM at all.

The distinguishing question is simple: is the dog asleep? Genuine sleep vocalisation stops when the dog wakes. If it continues, or if the dog was awake the whole time, you are looking at something else.