In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge dismisses a ghostly encounter as a result of a crumb of cheese he ate before bed. This idea that cheese can cause nightmares is a long-standing myth. However, it’s unlikely that cheese is the culprit behind your bad dreams. In 2005, the British Cheese Board funded a study to debunk this myth. In the study, 200 participants ate 20 grams of cheese before bed. While 67% of them remembered their dreams, none reported nightmares. Instead, they had unusual dreams, like a vegetarian crocodile or soldiers fighting with kittens. The study suggested that different cheeses might influence dreams differently, with Stilton cheese leading to the weirdest dreams.
It’s important to note that this study had limitations: it was unpublished, lacked a control group, and was funded by the British Cheese Board, likely for publicity. Despite this, the idea of “cheese dreams” remains unproven. No foods have been scientifically shown to cause nightmares. A study of nearly 400 Canadian university students found that 18% believed food could make their dreams more bizarre or disturbing. Researchers proposed several explanations, including food intolerances, misattribution, or simply the power of suggestion.
So, feel free to enjoy your favorite bedtime snack. Just avoid eating in bed to prevent crumbs from getting everywhere!
Many people believe that dreams only occur during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. While REM dreams are more vivid and memorable, we actually dream throughout the night. Non-REM dreams tend to be simpler and less emotional. Have you ever had a dream where you’re just at work? It’s like a dream rip-off, right? But after working from home for so long, even a mundane work dream can feel refreshing.
Another common misconception is that dreams are meaningless. While it’s challenging to draw conclusions from a single dream, research suggests that dreams often reflect our daily concerns. Recurring dreams, like being unprepared for a test, can persist long after school and often arise during stressful times. So, if you’re anxious about an upcoming job interview, don’t be surprised if your subconscious revisits that old math test nightmare.
Some people think that remembering dreams indicates a good night’s sleep, but that’s not entirely true. In fact, people with poor sleep are more likely to remember their dreams. A 2014 study in Cerebral Cortex found that participants who remembered their dreams had more ‘wakefulness,’ suggesting they woke up more often. These individuals also had higher brain activity in areas processing information and emotions, which might explain their interrupted sleep patterns. Essentially, sleep-deprived individuals experience more intense sleep, leading to vivid dreams.
If you believe you never dream, that’s probably a misconception. A 2015 French study in the Journal of Sleep Research explored whether everyone dreams. Researchers studied individuals with REM sleep behavior disorder, which causes people to act out their dreams. Fewer than 4% claimed they never dreamed, but observations suggested otherwise. Most people forget 95-99% of their dreams, even though adults average four to six dreams per night.
Dreams won’t kill you, although some once believed they could. In 1981, reports emerged of Southeast Asian refugees dying from heart attacks in their sleep, allegedly due to PTSD-induced nightmares. However, these deaths were linked to a genetic disorder called Brugada syndrome, not dreams. During REM sleep, heart rate becomes less stable, posing a risk for those with heart disease.
One popular myth is that dying in a dream means you’ll die in real life. Fortunately, there’s no scientific evidence to support this. Instead, death dreams often symbolize significant life changes or endings, like leaving a job or ending a relationship.
Abraham Lincoln’s supposed dream predicting his assassination is a famous death dream myth. According to his friend Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln dreamt of his own death shortly before it happened. However, historians doubt the story’s accuracy due to inconsistencies and the fact that Lamon only published it 20 years later.
Lucid dreaming, popularized by the film Inception, is the ability to be aware of and sometimes control your dreams. This concept dates back to ancient times, with mentions by Aristotle and St. Augustine. Modern lucid dreaming is credited to Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913. While you might become conscious of dreaming, controlling the dream isn’t necessary for it to be considered lucid.
Despite what Inception suggests, you can’t share dreams with others. If you and a friend have similar dreams, it’s likely just a coincidence.
If you have other topics with misconceptions you’d like to explore, let us know. And remember, this has all been a dream, so hopefully, you don’t forget what you’ve learned!
Conduct your own experiment to explore the relationship between cheese and dreams. Gather a group of friends and have each person consume a different type of cheese before bed for a week. Record and compare your dreams each morning. Discuss whether your findings align with the British Cheese Board study and consider the limitations of your experiment.
Keep a dream journal for two weeks, noting down your dreams as soon as you wake up. At the end of the period, analyze your dreams for recurring themes or patterns. Reflect on how these might relate to your daily life or stressors, and discuss your findings with classmates to explore commonalities and differences.
Attend or organize a workshop on lucid dreaming techniques. Learn about methods such as reality checks, dream journaling, and mnemonic induction. Practice these techniques and share your experiences with the group. Discuss the potential benefits and challenges of lucid dreaming.
Participate in a debate on whether dreams have significant meanings or are merely random brain activity. Research different psychological and neurological perspectives on dreams. Formulate arguments for both sides and engage in a structured debate with your peers, considering the evidence and theories presented in the article.
Choose a dream you have recorded and create a piece of art, such as a drawing, painting, or short story, inspired by it. Share your creation with the class and explain how your dream influenced your work. Discuss how creative expression can be a tool for understanding and interpreting dreams.
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 rap 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 quite unusual. 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. The research did imply that different cheeses had different effects, with Stilton cheese providing the weirdest of dreams.
It’s worth noting 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 phenomenon 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. Alternatively, 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 that 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 want to 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*, 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 researchers’ 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 nor Lincoln’s wife mentioned the dream in the immediate aftermath of the assassination—Lamon 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. 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!
Dreams – Dreams are sequences of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep, often reflecting subconscious thoughts and desires. – In his research on dreams, the psychologist explored how recurring themes might reveal underlying anxieties.
Nightmares – Nightmares are distressing dreams that cause the dreamer to feel a number of disturbing emotions, commonly fear and anxiety. – The literature professor discussed how nightmares in Gothic novels often symbolize the protagonist’s internal struggles.
Sleep – Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body, characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, and inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles. – The study on sleep patterns among university students revealed a correlation between sleep deprivation and decreased academic performance.
Subconscious – The subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness but influences thoughts, feelings, and actions. – In literary analysis, the author’s use of symbolism often taps into the reader’s subconscious, evoking deeper emotional responses.
Emotions – Emotions are complex psychological states that involve three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response. – The research paper examined how emotions can affect decision-making processes in high-pressure situations.
Misconceptions – Misconceptions are incorrect or mistaken views or ideas based on faulty thinking or understanding. – The psychology lecture aimed to address common misconceptions about mental health disorders and their treatment.
Students – Students are individuals who are engaged in learning, especially those enrolled in an educational institution. – The professor encouraged students to critically analyze the psychological themes present in the novel.
Research – Research is the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. – Her research in cognitive psychology focused on how memory retrieval processes are affected by stress.
Cheese – Cheese, in the context of psychology, can refer to a metaphorical concept used in studies or literature to symbolize comfort, reward, or a goal. – In the motivational seminar, the speaker used cheese as a metaphor for personal goals, urging students to pursue their own “cheese” despite obstacles.
Lucid – Lucid, in the context of dreams, refers to the clarity of awareness within a dream, where the dreamer is conscious of dreaming and can sometimes control the dream narrative. – The phenomenon of lucid dreaming was explored in the psychology class, highlighting its potential for therapeutic applications.
