Do certain foods really alter your dreams?

I had a certain brand of waffles a few years ago and can’t awake from this national nightmare since. I had a dream. I had a dream where a man, a true man, will be able to finish his breakfast and the nightmare had ended. Real men could finish their breakfast, and real men could make the dream we all once had to come true and alter the hope for us all.

My fiancé consistently has very strange and vivid dreams whenever he eats pizza too late at night. He never has this happen with any other foods. Personally, I’ve never found a correlation between my dreams and my diet.

“There has not been any research to determine how and if food specifically affects dreams, says Donna Arand, PhD, clinical director of the Kettering & Sycamore Sleep Center in Ohio. “However, if a person eats any food that upsets their stomach, gives them heartburn, or makes them feel ill, that can make their dreams unpleasant,” she says, because any type of physiological discomfort can lead to bad dreams.”

Source

This happened to me in China.

We’d all been out East for at least a month at that point, and 4 of us went out for dinner at this pizza place (the kro’s nest, Beijing), and had a huuuuge pizza between us.

Next morning, we all reported having insane dreams that night. There being no “special” mushrooms or herbs on the pizza, I thought it might be due to us eating so much cheese after so long without it.

A similar thing happened to me another time I ate a large amount of cheese.

There is no explanation of the mechanism of this, but the same can be said for many neurological/physiological phenomena, and there is certainly anecdotal evidence for it.

My experience has only been with real cheese, I don’t know if this would apply in America.

Not food in particular as I don’t really eat junk foods. But when I’ve taken flu meds I’ve gotten horrible nightmares where I feel I can’t wake up and monsters are after me. Also when I’ve used those foot detox patches I’ve gotten disturbing dreams too because it releases toxins that is stored in the body.

I’ve heard an old wive’s tale that eating cheese before bed gives you nightmares, although I’ve never experienced it myself. I guess cheese is heavy, fatty and slow to digest, so maybe having your digestive system working overtime while you’re asleep doesn’t allow you to sleep well.

What is almost guaranteed to give me nightmares is if I’m woken too early, and then I go back to sleep again. I nearly always have the most vivid dreams in that second sleep.

I think so! If all energy affects other energy, wouldn’t what you eat before sleep affect dreams? It’s just chemistry, no?

Here is a funny article claiming cheese “helps you have the kind of dreams you want to have”. Interestingly enough, it is on the dairy council website! how’s that for conflict of interest!

I definitely have more vivid and/or frightening dreams when I eat spicy food right before I go to bed. If I eat that same spicy food many hours earlier, I don’t seem to have that problem.

I believe it’s mostly how your digestive system deals with food that may affect your dreams, rather than what you eat. When your system is digesting food while you sleep/try to sleep, it disrupts the brain while it ’‘shuts down’’ so to speak, and this may cause nightmares.
In a way, it’s true that certain foods are more badass than others, but again this is because of the digestion process. For example, eat a big meal and it will most likely impede the sleeping process a lot more than just toast or something. You also have to consider the ingredients, like sugar, spicy stuff and whatnot. The system has to work harder for different kinds of food, although I couldn’t elaborate much on any specifics.