Belief in animal dreams was widespread at the height of the Victorian era. The antivivisection movement was gaining steam in Europe and North America, and public attitudes about the status of animals were changing rapidly. In this climate, the conditions were ripe for increased interest in the mental and emotional lives of animals. Among the scientists of the time, this interest expressed itself as a general openness to a wide variety of claims—some more empirically grounded than others—about animal experience, including claims about what happens to animals when they sleep. This belief was so widespread that Darwin’s protege, the evolutionary biologist George Romanes, cited Lindsay’s theory of animal dreams enthusiastically in his 1883 masterpiece Mental Evolution in Animals.
In this book, which was read with gusto by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Romanes went further than Lindsay in asserting that dreaming proves that animals are endowed with the ...
