h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is there any truth to the old wives tale that eating cheese before you go to bed makes you dream. I would like to dream more as think you are in a better frame of mind when you wake up the next morning.

Maybe someone knows of alternatives to cheese?

I also remember someone saying that dreaming does for your brain what hard-disk defragmentation does for your PC - reshuffling the information so that what you use least gets stored in areas with slower access. In this way you are ready for what the next day might throw at you. Seems as good an argument as any for doing more of it...

Prunequallor

supposedly you shouldn't eat anything just before bed as your body can't shut down to sleep as it is having to digest things.

I heard the same thing about what dreams are all supposed to really be.

I think cheese is supposed to give you crazy wild dreams. Possibly even disturbing dreams. I think its just the idea of difficult to digest foods / things that might curdle in your stomach overnight, affecting your subconscious mind. Acid would do the job too i guess.

I always eat cheese before i go to bed (well almost) and very rarely remember my dreams.

Everybody seems to dream, although some people's dreams are more dramatic than others. (A relation of mine told me "I dreamt I went to the shops"). If you are woken up while you are dreaming you will remember the dream for a few minutes or longer. If you are woken up at a different phase of your sleep, you will not remember having dreamt at all.

Nobody really knows why people dream, but cruel sleep deprivation experiments have been carried out on cats. Cats have two types of sleep, of which only one includes REM sleep. (Lying on side curled up includes REM, squatting with head up and paws tucked in at front does not). Cats deprived of REM sleep but allowed to sleep in the other way go crazy. From this, scientists have concluded that whatever dreams are for, they are vital to good mental health.

I think the disk defragmentation theory was probably thought up by a computer scientist. While it seems reasonable, I don't think any experiments have been done which back it up yet.