Wednesday, October 06, 2010
DREAM MANIPULATION THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF CHEESE
Who needs drugs when there’s provolone?
“There’s an old wives’ tale that claims that eating cheese before bed makes you dream weird and incredible things. For serious? The British Medical Journal thinks so. A finely-aged 1964 edition tells of a man whose nightly supper consisted of cheddar, served straight up. This man was haunted by horrible, horrible nightmares: “He dreamt of [a workmate], terribly mutilated, hanging from a meat-hook. Another, he dreamt of falling into a bottomless abyss. When cheese was withdrawn from his diet the nightmares ceased.” As we know, the British Medical Journal doesn’t lie. Doctors don’t study for ten years just so they can make shit up in a trade mag. Neither do old wives, for that matter. But if you’re still sitting there making scrunched-up “cheese isn’t a drug” faces at me, you’re not alone. For some weird reason, everyone wants to disprove the cheese-dream myth. For example, I told my housemate last night and she was all like, “Yeah, I suppose so. But it’s just cheese.” Just cheese? You’re an idiot, Claire.The fact is, cheese doesn’t grow on trees. It’s made using a pretty elaborate mélange involving milk, rennet (an enzyme taken from mammalian stomachs), and any number of molds—a hodgepodge of ingredients and baffling techniques. Most important, somewhere during that whole process, a thing called tyramine is produced. This is essentially a form of dopamine that, while it can’t get you stoned, can trigger high activity in the part of the brain that controls REM. In other words: If you shove a whole lot of it in your face just before sleepies, weird shit might happen." Click here for much more.
But beware the Evil Cheese Panda
Click here for Roy
The secret word is Gorgonzola
Norman Wisdom – RIP
I didn't click there for much more, but we must never forget Winsor McKay's pioneering comic strip Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, which weekly gave us horrible hallucinations which, in the last frame, were revealed to be because the dreamer had eaten too much rarebit.
ReplyDeleteGreat, now the DEA is going to start raiding dairies.
ReplyDelete