Can cheese REALLY give you nightmares?
You know that feeling when you really want to eat a cheese toastie while you binge on Gilmore Girls before bed, but you don’t want to give yourself nightmares? It’s a constant internal battle. The idea that eating cheese will lead to really scary dreams seems to be ingrained in all of us, but science says it’s not entirely true. Just hear us out for a minute...
The myth can be traced back as far as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge believed his ghostly apparitions were down to a crumb of cheese he ate before bed.
Nah, you were just really mean.
So the British Cheese Board decided to ‘put the myth to bed’, and carried out a study on 200 people to see what would happen if they ate cheese before they went to sleep.
Turns out, 75% of participants said they slept soundly - no nightmares - though they did have slightly stranger, more vivid dreams than usual.
Different types of cheese caused different types of dreams. Blue cheese resulted in more unusual dreams, Red Leicester made dreams more nostalgic and Lancashire made people dream about work.
Meanwhile, cheddar had people dreaming about celebrities, so it might be the way to go if you want Channing Tatum to come to you in the night.
All these strange goings-on while you sleep happen because cheese contains several compounds, including tryptamine and tyramine, which are believed to influence the brain’s chemical systems.
Basically, it means that while cheese hasn’t been proven to give you nightmares, it does influence what you dream about. So choose your cheese toastie toppings wisely...
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