I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about strong cheese before bed being responsible for some pretty unusual dreams.
Personally, I’ve never found this to be the case whenever I’ve eaten cheese in the evening but it’s made me wonder if there are foods and drinks that will provoke more vivid and interesting dreams.
Does anyone know of any?
Coffee usually does the trick for me, as well as foods with high potassium, such as bananas and potatoes. I don’t think there are foods/drinks that globally increase vividness and/or lucidity, because each of us is different, so our minds react to different things in different ways.
Stuff with a lot of B vitamins tend to increase vividness and coffee works for some people too (though, not me personally.) Milk and cheese are good too. Feta cheese resulted in an extremely vivid dream for me once.
I haven’t tried it, but it also makes sense that eating fish might lead to better recall.
We actually did an experiment in the lab a while back that involved milk. First week was sleep as regular, second with a glass of milk, third a glass of warm milk mixed with honey (due to a theory presented back then). The results generally showed an increase in recall and vividness.
Here’s the link: clicky
I’ve somewhat noticed strawberries and chocolate milk for myself. I choose chocolate milk not just because i like it more, but also because I remembered hearing chocolate being good for dreams. And, as Rhewin said, milk works, so kind of a 2 for one deal.
It does depend on the person though like Dablooey said. I’m actually in the early stages of making a program that will, hopefully, over time, link what foods and stuff are good for a specific person’s dreams. It’s a kind of electronic dream journal. You record the foods and stuff you eat before bed and rate the dream. Over many nights of sleep, it would be able to do some statistics on the subject and return to you the foods with the highest probability of good dreams.
But, I also think it is somewhat of a mind game. If you think a food will give you amazing dreams, then I think it is more likely to, like a placebo drug. It’s kind of like MILD, except for instead of with food.
I was close being lucid today, but when I asked myself:am I dreaming?
I woke up, but I did eat cheese before I was going to sleep, so I think its something ^^