By Tim Binnall
Researchers studying the sleeping habits of an octopus captured footage of what they suspect may be the creature waking up from a nightmare. The remarkable moments were reportedly documented during a month-long observation of a cephalopod, dubbed Costello, by scientists at New York's Rockefeller University. On four separate occasions, they creature was seen suddenly waking up from its sleep for no apparent reason and behaving in a fashion as if it were in distress, including two instances wherein the octopus deployed its defense mechanism of spraying ink into the water seemingly to ward off a predator. The puzzling episodes were made all the more perplexing by the way in which the creature behaved shortly thereafter.
The octopus, researcher Eric Angel Ramos marveled, "just got up like nothing had happened, and he resumed his day as normal." The curious chain of events led the scientists to speculate that perhaps the creature had been roused from its sleep by a nightmare. That said, they stressed that this hypothesis is merely theoretical and based only on their handful of observations. Other factors which could be to blame for the behavior, an independent expert opined, are disturbance from outside of Costello's tank or perhaps an end-of-life process known as senescence. Of course, if the creature truly was having a nightmare, it's impossible to what the content of the dream could have been, though our money is on something involving calamari.