Does cheese give you weird dreams? Research says it does

An online survey of more than 1000 students at Canada's MacEwan University found a strong association between bad dreams and lactose intolerance, potentially because gas or stomach pain during the night affects people's dreams.

Students were asked about about sleep patterns and any perceived association between different kinds of dreams and foods.

About a third of respondents reported regular nightmares. Roughly 25 percent thought particular foods could make their sleep worse.

Related stories:

Women were more likely to remember their dreams and to report poor sleep and nightmares and they were twice as likely as men to report a food intolerance or allergy.

Researcher and Director at Montreal's Dream & Nightmare Lab at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine Dr Tore Nielsen told Checkpoint they found three key findings that all pointed to food being associated with bad dreams.

"The first one was that people who had lactose intolerance were reporting more nightmares, and the severity of their symptoms was associated with the severity of the nightmares. So a linear relationship there."

Nielsen said that food allergies were generally also associated with nightmares in the same way. The third finding showed that an unhealthy diet could also be a trigger for a restless nights sleep.

"An unhealthy diet in general was associated with bad dreams and nightmares," Nielsen said.

"By unhealthy I mean, eating very close to bedtime... but also not depending upon your internal signals or when you're hungry, and when you're full."

While it was not a firm finding, Nielsen said it was very likely that the severity of lactose intolerance would have an impact on the severity of the dreams.

"Many people don't know their status when it comes to lactose intolerance. I mean, it's a kind of spectrum, right? There's a there's very severe cases of lactose intolerance and then very, you know mild cases... the problem is that people will dose themselves with dairy according to their symptoms, you know, and doctors in fact tell people don't just quit entirely if you only have a mild case.

"People don't always judge this accurately or adhere to a strict enough diet. So, they do end up getting these symptoms when they're sleeping and they do end up affecting their dreams."

The research is yet to reach the point of discovering whether specific cheese's cause certain types of dreams, but Neilsen said it has been attempted before.

"The British Cheese Board, they published a study many years ago, and of course they gave people different kinds of cheese... and they claimed that they saw different patterns in the dream content depending on the type of cheese that they'd eaten."

"I forget which one, maybe the cheddar, but it triggered dreams about celebrities."

However, Neilsen said he highly doubts the accuracy of those findings.

"There's a conflict of interest in that it was the Cheese Board itself that ran the study, and it was never published in any kind of scientific journal. So, I think that was a little bit of disinformation that got out there on the internet."

For those who struggle to recall their dreams, cheese induced or not, Neilsen said there are a few ways to spark your memory.

"Have some a pad of paper or like something that you can record your dream on... it helps to have that by your bed so that if you wake up in the middle of the night, and you have a dream that you can quickly jot down some notes."

"It helps if you don't move when you wake up, because movement for some reason seems to really dissipate your memory of the dream."

Other ways to make your dreams stick included waking up slightly earlier than usual, people who forget their dreams often wake up in the wrong sleep stage. Neilsen said it's better to wake up from REM sleep because that's where most of the vivid dreaming occurs.