DOES GOUDA HAUNT YOUR DREAMS? | Cheese, Nightmares, and the Mystery of the Bedtime Dairy Dilemma
It may seem delicious, aged cheddar — but at 2 A.M., it may also be planning your psychological demise.
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS CHEESE
At some point since the beginning of time, humans went through the thought process, “Let’s figure out how to take some cow juice, let it sit around long enough for mold to grow on it, and then make that into something we’ll eat.”
That’s called “cheese,” and it has been marvelously ruining lives ever since… in the most delicious of ways. And now, according to science, it may also be waging guerrilla warfare inside your dreams.
It’s true — scientists have been murmuring about something dark and slippery involving late-night milk consumption and what they called “strange or disturbing dreams.” Translation: cheese might be calling up your subconscious boogeyman.
So now we all have to ask the real question: is it worth it? Can you stare down a plate of nachos that stands a chance of rendering your REM cycle the equivalent of a Saw movie?
THE STUDY THAT LIKELY RUINED PIZZA FOR YOU
In one particularly science-sounding project from Frontiers in Psychology, 1,082 poor souls were enlisted to gab about their eating and sleeping patterns. Like many psychology studies, it probably began with a question many of us can relate to: how weird, dirty, or bad were your dreams? We talked about this in junior high for giggles – Science is somehow being completely serious about it. Then again, those are the same nerds we never invited to our giggle sessions as we talked bout dirty dreams.
Some of the people surved, it turns out, cited cheese as the cause of their nighttime horror shows. “In lactose-intolerant individuals — i.e., the people whose stomach thinks dairy is an ex-girlfriend with boundary issues — nightmares were markedly more severe,” reads the study.
The scientists relied on something called the “Nightmare Disorder Index,” which — yeah, I hear ya — it does sound like a metal album by punk rock librarians, but according to scientists is a legitimate scientific instrument to gauge how terrifying your dreams end up being. Cheese came in at 22 percent on the Nightmare Disorder Index, with sweets even higher at 31 percent. So, in other words, cheesecake qualifies as a weapon of mass dream-scares.
The research also found that those with digestive disorders — the fancy way of saying their stomach revolted — were much more likely to dream that, for example, they were being pursued through a haunted Pizza Hut by a gorilla dressed as a clown and singing “Wheels on the Bus.” (What, just me?)
CHEESE: NIGHTTIME NEMESIS OR GASTRO-GOBLIN?
The science-y minds behind the study think it’s not just the cheese though. It’s your gut’s violent revolt against the cheese. The resulting intestinal bedlam could produce something known as “micro-arousals” during sleep — which sounds vaguely racy, but sadly is just your brain at 3:17AM going “WHAT IS HAPPENING” because your colon has decided to launch a counteroffensive.
Those micro-arousals are the kind of thing that can awaken you from slumber and maybe scoot you over to the nightmare dimension, in which anxieties about the price of Cabbage Patch Kids, what you’re going to do about those un-filed taxes, and that one time you sneezed on your boss all get folded into a wacky psychological Cuisinart.
And in case we needed any help realizing how ridiculous all this was, one researcher cited a turn-of-the-century cartoonist who attributed all his wonky dream sequences to Welsh rarebit. If you’re not familiar, a Welsh rarebit is nothing more than spicy cheese toast — but this one’s retroactively a nighttime terror trigger.
THE DAIRY DILEMMA: TO SNACK, OR NOT TO SNACK?
Let’s be real: we’ve all gone to bed in the dead of night full of cheese and had whatever the heck that dreamscape is where David Lynch drinks a six-pack of Red Bull the night before directing you to sleep. Perhaps you awoke to discover your cat was speaking Latin… backwards. Perhaps you dreamt of a chamber full of meatball people laughing at you as you defend yourself in court because passing gas in front of the dog is now a crime… and you’re naked. These are not normal dreams. These are gouda-powered gateways to anarchy of the mind.
But now we know it’s not only cheese that gets moldy. It’s cheese plus a gut that seeks revenge. If you are lactose intolerant and still diving mouth-first into a wheel of brie before bed, you’re basically playing Russian roulette with your subconscious.
AND NOW, THE FINAL WORD FROM THE CHEESE TRENCHES
So here we are — suspended between the comforting, creamy pull of bedtime milk and the very real possibility of dreaming that we’re being devoured by sentient lasagna.
Is cheese the problem? Not exactly. No, it’s more like your GI tract is holding a secret horror film festival and cheese is the headliner.
The good news is that you don’t even need a doctor to tell you what to do. Just follow your intuition — it’s likely already shouting. Maybe try a nighttime celery stick instead. Or don’t. Just don’t be surprised if your dream-self gets stuck in a cheddar maze patrolled by lactose-intolerant werewolves.
Sleep tight. And for the love of sanity, do not order the quesadilla.
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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.
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