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Why We Have Crazy Dreams
Everyone’s had them; dreams so vivid and bizarre, you wake up in the morning with full recollection, totally bewildered.
I dreamed last night that whilst having dinner with some friends and admiring their enviable harbour view, I saw an explosion on Hong Kong Island fill the skyline— similar to a scene in a disaster movie. A mushroom cloud formed and grew bigger and bigger. Buildings started to crumble slowly at first, and then accelerating; every single man-made structure came crashing down.
What’s even more bizarre is that it was evident I was not invited to this dinner. Savory pies were on the menu; one for each person, except me of course. They didn’t know I was coming. I don’t have any answers to the very rational questions you might have about this. It was a dream after all.
‘It’s what I ate’
If you’ve ever Googled ‘Foods that cause weird dreams’, you’ll have heard of Tryptophan. It’s an amino acid found in certain foods, that converts into Serotonin causing extremely vivid dreams. Website My Food Data provides statistics around this.
The Cheese Theory 🧀 — Tyramine
There’s a theory that cheese causes weird dreams, so I decided to look into this. According to an article in BBC’s Science Focus:
“One theory linking cheese to nightmares points to a chemical in cheese called tyramine, which comes from the amino acid tyrosine. Tyramine triggers the release of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline in an area of the brain linked to dream sleep. But plenty of other foods with no reported nightmare links, such as chocolate, also contain tyramine, so there’s a definite need for more proof on this one.”
So the jury’s out on this theory. And by the way, I didn’t eat any cheese yesterday, but I thought this might be interesting
Dream Interpretations — Psychoanalysis
Now for the fun Freudian stuff..
Disclaimer: I want to state that the blog post I am about to reference has no basis in science or facts.
