Do Animals Dream?
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The octopus is still, suspended upside down on the glass wall of her tank, just below water level. Her eyes are shut, her eight arms knotted snug behind her head, her pale-gray body gently pulsing. She is sleeping. Then: a twitch, a sudden creep of yellow, and her genus’s famously mutable skin plunges deep violet. The arms writhe in place, the head bobs, and the skin morphs again, this time to a spiky, mottled green serving as camouflage. After a minute, the flashes of color calm. The dream, apparently, is over.
The video of this octopus, Heidi, aired in 2019 as part of an episode of series, and subsequently went viral. In it, the narrator, a marine biologist, describes how Heidi’s changing color patterns may indicate what’s happening in her mind as she sleeps. He imagines her dream: She spots a crab, pursues and kills it, then leaps from the ocean floor—that’s when she turns
