Do Octopus dream?

An Octopus called Heidi is sleeping. Her body still, eight arms hidden neatly away. But her skin is changing. She turns from ghostly white to yellow, a quick flash of deep red, then goes green and bumpy like some of the plant life found deep in the ocean. Her muscles tense and relax.

If you haven’t seen the video, watch it here –

From the outside, the cephalopod looks like a human twitching and muttering during dreams, or like a kipping dog chasing rabbits. 

“If she is dreaming, this is a dramatic moment,” said David Scheel, an octopus researcher at Alaska Pacific University. Heidi was living in a tank in his living room when her snooze was captured on film. He further speculated that she is imagining catching and eating a crab.

Looking at a behavior like Heidi’s is “a bit like going to a crime scene,” said Nicola Clayton, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge..

She added, “You’ve got some evidence in front of you, but you’d need to know so much more to understand better what’s causing the behavior.”

It’s only conjecture to say the octopus is dreaming without further study, she said. Does the sequence of color changes match a sequence she had whilst awake? Dreaming in humans usually happens during rapid-eye movement, or R.E.M., sleep.

Could we be observing something similar in octopuses?