When I was in elementary school, a friend of our had a hamster who would climb to the top of his cage and sleep hanging upside down. They named him Batman, of course.

My dog's dream-behavior is pretty consistent: Paws twitching, lips curling, low grunts, sometimes a muffled throaty bark.

No way to tell, but it's probably cat-chase- related, since that's the only thing she really gets worked up about.

[0] ... and given that two of them were orphaned at 7-10 days, and two of them were abandoned, it's no great leap of faith

I had a hamster when I was about 8 or 9, but I don't remember it exhibiting behavior like PB. On the occasions when it got away (while the cage was being cleaned, I suppose) it would hide under/behind the refrigerator.

I doubt Porco will speak of this, and I, as the saying goes, had the story from one with no business to tell it. It may, some time after those involved have gone to turn the wheels of a better world, be fictionalized as Wir Hamstern Geheimnisse (UK title, Hamsters at the Gates of Dawn, US title My Gun Has Fur).

I don't see why hamsters can't have nightmares; dogs definitely do. I've had to shake the mastiff awake occasionally when he was crying in his sleep.

then again, you don't appear to be an unpleasant household like Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon.... therefore he must NOT be Harry Hamster, doomed to do battle with the fierce Vole-demort sometime in the future.

(ducking and running like hell)

Wee cats often suckle in their sleep, which is totally adorable.

Not to mention I'm dressed only in my hamster underwear.

(I got the link from SFF.net. Don't worry; it's not gross.)

There's a popular-science here, which slides off into a humorists's idea of rat dream diaries about midway through; the original paper is "Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep", Neuron vol. 29, pp. 145-156.

Greg Costikyan? I've played some of the games he designed. Small world, isn't it (but it still needs a big table for the map).

It took them a few weeks to warm up to one another-- Rupert came from a litter of five and was raised in a social groomng environment. Lucy was a stray we picked up form the street at about a month old and was an only cat until Rupert came along. She wants nothing to do with social grooming but soon, he'll be bigger so perhaps she'll learn to like it.

Perhaps he's dreaming of repeated defeat at the hands of Cap(ybara) America.

Chronic administration of melatonin reduces REM sleep in the Djungarian hamster (Phodopus sungorus).

Pyewacket used to whimper in her sleep sometimes, so there's another vote for cats.

Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me.

My older brother always wanted a hamster, but my mom wouldn't let him. I always thought it would be fun to have something different for once. Sigh. I wish your new hamster a long healthy life (despite the poor thing and his nightmares).

If I'd noticed the scar first thing, he might have gotten a different name. I was originally thinking of naming him Ash -- I got him a day or two after Ash Wednesday, and he has yellow black coloration, like toast with a light dusting of soot on it. But the name "Porco Bruno" popped into my head and wouldn't go away, so after a while I gave up and went with it. It's not a bad name for a hamster with a tropism for insanely fearless aerial maneuvers.

Charles Dodgson, I believe you've nailed the question. If rats dream of specific events, I have to assume that hamsters do the same.

Jeffrey, a little bit of greenery in their diet is a good thing. Too much is a problem.

Elizabeth Bear, thank you. Thinking of PB as a post-rescue animal pulls it all into focus. I've been getting advice on one of the hamster chat groups, and the most knowledgeable guy there casually refers to having to do animal rescues at NYC pet shops. I'd been wondering for some time now how pet shops could put more than one Syrian hamster in a cage and make it work. Apparently the answer is that they don't always make it work, which leads to fights, injuries, and occasional deaths.

Hard to believe they get that wrong. The first paragraph on the first page of the Notional Hamster Manual says "Solitary species -- one hamster per cage, period."

Boy is this true. My brother and I each had a hamster when we were kids, and because we didn't know this (and a lot of other stuff about hamsters) we put them in the same cage -- and, well, unpleasantness resulted.

My dog whimpers in her sleep sometimes. Less frequently, she'll wag her tail, thumping it against her bed. I always wonder what she's dreaming of.

Me, I wonder if the scar doesn't hark back to his brief career as a student in Heidelberg. It's not surprising that they make dueling masks that small, but I imagine a hamster's seconds have the devil of a time getting the duellist into the thing.

And what of the hamsters of Jena?

Aerial maneuvers? ^^ That and Bruno's name reminds me of the movie "Porco Rosso". Are you a Studio Ghibli and/or a Hayao Miyazaki fan?

There are animal shelters that specialize in small pets such as hamsters, mice, rabbits, and the like. (One such is Red Door Shelter.) Anyone looking for a small pet may want to see if they can get one from a shelter rather than a pet store.

As for pet stores in general, my opinion of them in general has been going down since I got married and my wife who was a veternarian technician for a while and went to school for animal science started explaining the difference between a dog breeder and a "puppy mill".

The next time I get a yen to write some bad fiction, the sentence "I awoke to hear the hamster screaming" is going in there somewhere.

I wouldn't bet on it. We have four cats, two about 13 years, one 6, one 4 (and if I'd known we'd wind up with these guys I definitely would have named them Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie, but I digress). The 4-year-old is a Siamese mix female weighing in at 11 pounds; the 6-year-old is a former stray male, looks like a Bombay and weighs in somewhere around 15 pounds.

Long story short, little girl kicks big boy's posterior all the time. She thinks nothing of launching herself right at him, muckling on to his neck and bringing him down like he's about to be branded with a hot iron. And she was raised at a breeder's with a lot of mothers and kittens, so in her sweeter moments she functions as the glue for the bunch and head-butts all the others and us.

Personality has a lot more to do with it than size, at least at our house.

As for dreaming, I have heard her growling, almost yowling, fiercely while she dream-twitches.

The stray boy, who used to climb on shoulders expressly to suckle on earlobes, occasionally still does nurse in his sleep.

He has always had a serious problem with separation anxiety -- we've worked on reassuring him, but even now he sometimes cries and puffs up his tail quasi-aggressively if he knows we're getting ready to leave. Occasionally he also licks bald spots on the inner surface of forelegs and hindlegs if there's a lot going on in the household.

I've always thought the pet store experience marked him negatively -- Siamese tend to form solid attachments to one or two persons, so it can't have been good for him emotionally in that pet shop cage, especially at an imprintable stage of life.

I hope Porco Bruno acclimates eventually. It takes effort, but working to calm Cosmo has also had a calming influence on us.

My kitties are rescues (although one came directly from the breeder -- she has anxiety disorder and compulsive disorder) and they're all a little flighty. They all groom and chase each other, though. The sad part is when Shiva thinks he can tag me and I'll dash. None of them seem to dream in their sleep, but Shiva snores.

Second was an older lady who couldn't deal with having a male (though castrated) carnivore in her house; fair enough. Even now the chase-the-kitty game can be wearing.

Third family had other cats, and Ares does not deal well with other cats; it's not that he hates them in themselves, but he gets very jealous when they get the attention that he thinks is his due. (This is what short-circuited my mom's attempt to appropriate my cat, so I guess I should be grateful.) He went back to the shelter again when he attacked one of the children while she was holding another cat.

In any case, Ares was just starting to not have hissy fits every time we left the house when my boyfriend and I broke up and I moved cross-country. Three months later the poor thing was sent to me with someone he'd never met, by car.

He's much calmer now, but it took some doing and there is nothing that can make him not wet himself when put in the cat carrier. And I don't blame him a bit.

"Torie 7*, Torie 9 is trapped on the 6 train between Hell's Gate and Highpockets. She's down to a life-or-death choice between using her phone battery for a sales conference or Warcraft Online. It's the bottom of the ninth with long yardage. You and Torie 14a are going to have to photocopy like your lives depended on it, because they do."

"Isn't this a job for Torie 22bis?"

"Torie 22bis and Torie 34.7 are still bleeding from the Cheney memoir, and Torie 4 MkII Mod 3 just threw a Naturalizer in the third furlong. We needya, Miz Doe."

"I am not a Torie! I am an unlisted number!"

"I hate this! I feel like a character in 1984! One of the rats, in fact!"

"You think that's bad . . . I'm starting to feel like one of the troopers in Zulu."

"Oh, well, if it's a war of numerical references you want . . ."

[Slowly rising cries of havoc]

*All numbers are ficticious.