A couple of years ago an octopus named Heidi was filmed changing colours as she slept. The footage shows her flickering from a ghostly shade of white to yellow and then turning a deep shade of burgundy before morphing into a mottled green pattern.
The video went viral. Millions were instantly mesmerised by Heidi in her slumber, particularly because the narrator speculates that she’s having a vivid dream – dreaming that she’s hunting and eating a crab, like a snoozing dog chasing “dream rabbits”.
Was Heidi really hunting “dream crabs”? Or was she simply experiencing a muscle twitch that controls her colour-changing skin cells? The video footage is only one piece of the puzzle. We need to know more about an octopus’s sleep patterns to understand what was causing Heidi’s colourful slumber.