I had a bad dream last night - a rarity for me. Strange thing is, I told my girlfriend the next morning and she had suffered a nightmare too.
Immediately she noted that it must have been because we had a lot of cheese in our meal the night before. Can’t say I have ever heard of anything so bizarre, but she swears by the theory.
So anybody know? Does cheese give you bad dreams? I have been told (and believed) that being hot while you sleep can make your dreams more vivid, but where does cheese fit into all of this?
Many aged cheeses contain tyramine, to which some people are allergic. Wierd histamine responses may affect dream content. The only hard evidence I found for the later is anecdotal:
Hmm, well, Celyn’s VERY late night/early hours of morning munching of “Seiously Strong Cheddar, winner of Best British Cheese Awards and Gold Medal at the World Cheese Awards” produced no nightmares and I even woke feeling fine after only about 3 or 4 hours sleep.
That’s unusual, actually - perhaps I should do that more often!
Heheh - wonder if I should go and buy some Stilton or something in the interests of further research: this could be fun.
'Tis odd, though, I wonder how this legend, for want of a better woord, started. Sounds as though Exapno Mapcase would have known if there was any truth in it though.
Puzzled Celyn.
And isn’t cheese meant to be one of the foods that are bad for migraine? I wonder if there is any connection. Or perhaps the migraine thing is a bit of a myth too.
Celyn now thinks both Pnster and Nigel Whie of the Cheese Board are very wonderful people. Great reason for lots of lovely cheese. Will get fat, though, but, well, can’t win them all.
I started eating a lot of cheese about 1.5 years ago. I don’t think I’ve experienced a single nightmare after that. But I didn’t have many nightmares before either.
I was sitting on a couch watching an episode of Seinfeld with my parents, when I decided to start practicing telekenisis. I did so by lifting small coffee cups and messing with the color on the television. My mother became extremely angry, as she believed telekenisis to be a power bestowed by the devil, and left the room. She was replaced by Haley Joel Osment’s character from the Sixth Sense, who took me to a graveyard. There, he pointed to some graffiti on the wall which looked as if it had been scrawled in brown magic marker and had a couple of weird numbers on it (1 6 49 6660). He claimed that he had scrawled these numbers long ago, and that they predicted the eventual event of Regan from the exorcist becoming possessed. He claimed that he had told her parents of this, but they had not listened. In the meantime I wondered how all of this was possible, considering the obvious timeline inconsistancies.
Well, it WAS a lot more vivid than most of my dreams, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a nightmare. Here are some variables to consider.
I went to sleep circa 1:30am Eastern US time, and awoke at about 7:45am.
I ingested about 1/4 lb of freshly bought colby jack cheese about an hour before I slept.
Other things I ingested within a significant amount of time before sleep: 3 cigarettes, 2 non-caffeinated sodas and 2 hours worth of Discovery channel programming.
I have seen only 3 episodes of Seinfeld, and as far as I know from avid fans talking about it constantly, the episode in my dream does not exist.
I have seen the Sixth Sense twice when it was in the theater, but have not seen it sense. I liked it enough, but probably will not own it on DVD.
The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it at least 40 times and do own it on DVD, and a scene from it is on my desktop.
I do not now or ever recall believing in telekenisis.
I just relocated across country about a month ago, but have not had a single vivid dream until last night.
All that being said, I’m assuming that one of the biggest factors was that I knew I was experimenting with this and was expecting something to happen.
So there you have it. Other than the fact that now that people know what I dream they’ll probably remove me from their Christmas card list, I’m really not sure that this experiment did anything. But I gave it a good ol’ MeatBeast college try.
Anecdotally speaking: I rarely have nightmares. A few months ago I ate a good chunk of blue cheese (Gorgonzola or Stilton or so, can’t remember), after dinner. That night I did have a bad dream. I attributed it to the cheese.
I normally also eat cheese, but those are lighter Dutch cheeses (think gouda). So my unscientific guess is it applies to strong/heavy cheeses only.
Anecdotal evidence is not “better than nothing.” It is nothing.
Eating cheese is contraindicated when taking many pills of the class of MAO inhibitors because of the possible hypertensive reaction (although most of the newer formulations on the market allow up to 200g of hard cheese or 2000g of soft cheese - quite a bit, actually).
And I know of no study whatsoever that has ever established a link between tyramine and nightmares in children. Even the link you cited does not contain the words “tyramine” or “cheese”. (Don’t know of any link in adults, either.)
Just because something is widely spread across the Internet doesn’t make it true.
It may yet be shown to be true, or at least a contributory cause. But it’s not now.
Have too much cheese to eat before bedtime last night Exapno? You seem a little testy today. OTOH, it’s good to see you starting to look things up before spouting certainties. Speaking of which, do you happen to have your proof of this little gem handy?
When people claim meaning for anecdotal evidence after something has been shown to be true, they conveniently forget that every subject has a thousand anecdotes. Many of these will flatly contradict one another, and some are demonstrably false, even harmful.
It is the equivalent of throwing a thousand darts blindfolded and taking credit for one that landed in the bulls-eye without bothering to acknowledge the half-dozen that lodged in peoples’ faces.
The anecdotal “evidence” that is being spread across the net is not evidence any more than creation “science” is science.
And I always get testy when people post nonsense about medical topics. Shouldn’t everybody?
Tyrosine is a potent sympathomimetic, though when consumed in food it is largely metabolized in the gut by enteric monamine oxidase A. However, if you really pound the cheese, you will get measurable plasma levels of tyrosine, which can activate noradrenergic receptors indirectly by causing norepinephrine release from secratory vessicles in neurons. Hence, it can have some of the same CNS and cardiovascular effects as a mild stimulant. Also, it displaces amino acids like tryptophan from transport proteins, decreasing its bioavailability.
So, tyrosine has two effects on sleep: It is activating in large doses via two indirect mechanisms, one noradrenergic, the other serotonergic (and melatonergic, I suppose, since tryptophan is a precursor of both).
Perhaps consuming large amounts of tyramine increases REM sleep and decreases deep sleep. Hence, you’re more likely to have dreams, and maybe remember them too.
Well, according to Dickens at least, certain foods, including cheese, can cause vivid dreams and nightmares. Scrooge tells Marley’s ghost. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”.
At least anecdotally there’s some history behaind it. The studies being done here may prove something.
