At one point in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge dismisses a ghostly
encounter as being just as likely from the crumb of cheese he had before bed.
It sounds a bit odd, but cheese has historically gotten a bad wrap for its ability to conjure
nightmares.
It's unlikely that cheese is the root of your nighttime terrors, though.
In 2005, the British Cheese Board funded a study to debunk the myths about cheese causing
nightmares.
As part of the experiment, two hundred participants snacked on 20 grams of cheese a half hour
before bedtime.
Of the 67 percent of cheese eaters who reported remembering their dreams, none of them recorded
nightmares.
The dreams they did have, however, were pretty funky.
One participant detailed dreaming about a vegetarian crocodile who was distressed about
not being able to eat children, while another dreamt of soldiers who fought with kittens
instead of guns. That one's pretty cute, actually.
The research did also imply that different cheeses had different effects, with Stilton
cheese providing the weirdest of dreams.
It’s worth nothing that there are quite a few holes in this study—it’s unpublished,
there was no control group, and it was funded by the British Cheese Board, likely as a PR
move.
But still, it’s unlikely scary “cheese dreams” are a real phenomena to worry about.
No foods have been proven to cause bad dreams.
A study of almost 400 Canadian university students found that around 18 percent of them
thought that food could make their dreams “more bizarre or disturbing” but the researchers
broke it down into a few different possibilities.
One is that it was something to do with the food itself.
Alternately it might have to do with food intolerances and other reactions, misattribution,
or just that we’ve been told for so long that food causes bad dreams we’ve all just
come to believe it.
Or indeed some combination of all of the above!
So go ahead, treat yourself to your favorite pre-bed treat.
For science!
But just don’t…
eat it in bed.
The crumbs get everywhere, and then it's all up in your sheets. And you're rolling around for weeks just itchy...
No thank you.
And that’s just the first misconception about dreams we’ll be talking about today.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and this is Mental Floss on YouTube from home.
There’s a lot we don’t know about dreams, but we do know that they only occur during
REM sleep. Right?
Well, that was the common wisdom for a long time.
Now, it’s been proven that we actually dream throughout the night.
We’re just more likely to remember the dreams we have during REM sleep—named, by the way,
for the rapid eye movement that happens during that part of our sleep cycle.
These REM sleep dreams tend to be more vivid, exciting, and just plain weird.
Non-REM sleep dreams, on the other hand, are simpler and less emotional.
By the way, you ever have one of those dreams where you're just at work?
That's the whole dream?
It's kind of like a dream rip-off, right?
I didn't come here to relive my normal life, I wanna fly to an ice cream sundae mountain with Keanu Reeves!
But to be honest, I’ve been working from home for so long that now I kind of want to have
one of those work dreams. You know? Just like, go to the kitchen, get some coffee, say hi to Steve...
What's up Steve?
Another misconception is that dreams are entirely meaningless.
While it may be difficult to draw conclusions from any one particular dream, research suggests
that dreams are more than just a random montage of scenes that flit through our brains at night.
Recurring patterns in dreams often accurately reflect concerns people have about their daily lives.
And those dreams you had about being unprepared for a test or showing up to class in your
underwear aren’t limited to your high school days.
A person is likely to have those dreams long after they’ve graduated, as they often crop
up during times of stress.
So if you’re feeling extra anxious in the days leading up to a job interview, don’t
be surprised if your subconscious revives that old math test nightmare.
Some people say that remembering your dreams in the morning is an indication of a good
night's sleep, but that's not exactly true.
In fact, people with poor sleep are more likely to remember their dreams.
According to a 2014 report in Cerebral Cortex (I only read it for the articles), study participants
who remembered their dreams had twice as much ‘wakefulness’ which could be taken to
mean they woke up more often.
Dream rememberers also have higher activity in the temporoparietal junction, a part of
the brain that processes information and emotions, and they reacted more strongly to sounds,
which could help explain their interrupted sleep patterns.
Basically, people who are sleep-deprived tend to have greater sleep intensity during the
precious few hours they manage to sleep, which leads to more vivid dreams.
At this point, you may think you’re one of the rare people who doesn’t suffer from
any diet-induced dreams—or have any dreams at all.
But if you think that you never dream, that's probably a misconception, too.
A 2015 French study published in the Journal of Sleep Research sought to find whether or
not everyone dreams.
The researchers studied individuals with REM sleep behavior disorder, which causes people
to act out their dreams while they’re sleeping.
Fewer than four percent of the study’s participants claimed they never dreamed.
But the researcher’s analysis says otherwise.
They observed the participants while they slept, and found that even those who denied
dreaming still moved in a way that suggested they were, in fact, dreaming.
It’s more likely people just don’t remember their dreams.
Though adults average four to six dreams per night, most people forget between 95 to 99
percent of their dreams.
That actually reminds me of the dream I had last night.
I caught a fish!
OK yeah I caught - no, I was a fish.
No I was at a Phish concert...
Now onto a more morbid topic: dreams and death.
Your dreams won’t kill you, though for a time, people believed they could.
In 1981, it was reported that Southeast Asian refugees who fled from violent regimes died
from heart attacks in their sleep.
The suspected heart-weakening culprit?
PTSD-induced nightmares.
But as it turns out, these mysterious nighttime deaths were already a problem across Asia
and other parts of the world.
The nighttime terrors weren’t triggering the lethal heart attacks.
More recent research has linked the medical emergencies to a genetic disorder called Brugada
syndrome.
In this case, it’s REM sleep, not dreams, that are the danger.
Your heart rate becomes less stable during this part of the sleep cycle, putting those
with heart disease at greater risk.
One of the most popular dream myths is that dying in your dreams means you’ll die in
real life.
Fortunately, there's no scientific proof that dreaming of death will spell your actual doom.
Instead, death dreams have been interpreted to be about big life changes, or to symbolize
a major ending, like leaving a job or ending a relationship.
So even if you do find yourself confronting your own mortality in a dream, you’ll still
most likely live to see another day—your shaky relationship however, may not.
So, in the words of Shakespeare, “dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death.”
We can’t talk about dreams and death without mentioning Abraham Lincoln.
I mean we could, but we're not going to.
One of the most famous death dream myths is that Lincoln had a dream that predicted his
own demise.
According to the president’s friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, shortly before
he was assassinated, Lincoln told a group of people about a dream he had.
In the dream, he asked a group of mourning soldiers who had died.
They responded, “The president.
He was killed by an assassin.”
But modern historians have begun doubting how honest this premonitional tale may have
been, thanks to inconsistencies surrounding Lamon’s story.
In some accounts, Lincoln had this dream 10 days before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger;
in others, Lincoln foresaw his death just “a few days” before his fateful trip to
the theater.
There’s also the fact that neither Lamon or Lincoln’s wife mentioned the dream in
the immediate aftermath of the assasination—Lamont didn’t publish the tale until 20 years later.
We’ll end by debunking some myths about lucid dreaming, a concept that’s become
fairly mainstream over the last decade, thanks in some part to the 2010 film Inception.
Despite its modern fame, the idea that people can control dreams has actually been around
way longer—the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle mentioned it in his treatise On
Dreams, and St. Augustine writes about the concept in a letter dated to 415 CE.
But the modern history of lucid dreaming is usually credited to a Dutch psychiatrist named
Frederik van Eeden in 1913.
During a lucid dream, a person is aware that they’re dreaming.
Basically, they become conscious of the fact they’re in the middle of a subconscious
fantasy.
But just because someone realizes they’re dreaming doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll
be able to control what happens.
Sure, turning yourself into a flying superhero or waking up before something bad occurs may
happen, but these types of controlling actions aren’t actually necessary for a dream to
be considered lucid.
And, despite what Inception may have led you to believe, you can’t share your dreams
with other people.
If you and a friend have similar dreams on the same night, go ahead and chalk that up
to sheer coincidence. Or maybe I'm only saying that because someone planted that idea
in my head while I was sleeping night.
Probably not.
If you have another topic whose misconceptions you’d like us to explore, let us know in
the comments. And I figure I should tell you before this is over, this has all been a dream and you'll wake up soon.
Hopefully you don't forget all the things you learned.
Thanks for watching!