Columnist Susan Snyder: A dream is a wish a rat makes

Friday, Jan. 26, 2001 | 9:07 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Hold onto your mouse traps.

After much rumination and study, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that rats dream in detail.

I know, I know. Try to contain your glee.

"While any pet owner knows that animals seem to dream, and studies show that animals' brains follow the same series of sleeping states as ours do, this is the first time that researchers know what animals are dreaming about," a report MIT issued Wednesday says.

The study, partly paid for by the National Institutes of Health (i.e., "tax money"), proves animals replay the day's events when they dream, Matthew Wilson, the MIT researcher in charge of this monumental discovery, says in a release from the school.

"We know that they are in fact dreaming and their dreams are connected to actual experiences," he says.

Yeah, well, don't count on it.

When your cat is flaked out across a basket of clean laundry (white load if he's black; dark load if he's white), and his little feet start doing the twitchy thing, don't think for a minute he's dreaming about that can of grayish mush you opened for him yesterday.

He's dreaming you are 4 inches tall.

Wilson drew his conclusions through a study in which he first had to train four-footed, skinny-tailed rodents to run around a circular track for food. This probably didn't take very long, seeing as how your average rat thinks about food pretty much every waking minute.

He measured each rat's brain activity while it ran for food and while it slept. Now I'm thinking they didn't waste a whole lot of paper on recording the brain activity of a rat, but then I'm not an MIT graduate. The process probably was very lengthy and complicated.

Getting the little bugger to hold still while they attached those teeny suction cups with wires to its head probably was pretty tough. I'd rather give a dog a pill, you know?

Wilson and his helper (some poor graduate student who was hoping this study would help explain to Mom and Dad why they're paying for another year at MIT) then examined more than 40 rat dreams recorded while the animals were in their deepest mode of sleep.

Makes you wonder how many studies they had to do just to figure out when a rat is sleeping deeply, doesn't it?

Anyway, about half the brain waves recorded while the rats were dreaming showed the same activity recorded while the rats ran around and ate. This, Wilson says, proves they were replaying the running and eating parts of their day in their dreams.

The research doesn't say whether the other half of the dreams involved those where the rats dreamt they were falling or showing up for work in their underwear.

Wilson says learning how to study rat dreams could provide tools for treating such memory disorders as amnesia or Alzheimer's disease or find ways for people to better learn and memorize information.

It found a way for MIT's Center for Learning and Memory to survive another year on research grants.

Kind of makes you want to be a little nicer about whatever research UNLV is -- or thankfully isn't -- doing.