Preface to a Dream

Sleep. Although many dedicated programmers disagree, it is a process vital to our survival. This is unfortunate, because we’d be a great deal more productive if it wasn’t. Just imagine how much more progress could have been made by now in science, the arts and the general betterment of man if it wasn’t necessary for us to lie in a state of inactivity for approximately eight hours a day in order to remain healthy and sane.

Frankly, the whole routine would be extremely dull and tiresome (pardon the pun) if it wasn’t for a certain saving grace; dreams.

Dreams exist to make sleep more interesting, thus making us, being the easily bored species that we are, more inclined to do it. There are some crackpot scientific theories floating around that they are merely the result of your brain processing the events of days gone by, or an interpretive response to external stimuli, but these are quite obviously untrue. We (humans) invented dreams in order to make sleep tolerable, and before you ask why animals supposedly have them too, it’s because we were kind enough to share. So there.

Many things can affect the nature of one’s dreams. If one has been performing the same action repeatedly over the course of the day, it is likely that they’ll find themselves continuing to perform it inside their own head after they’ve gone to sleep. Someone who has experienced a traumatic event may have recurring nightmares about it. Here, however, there is one particular aspect that I intend to focus on:

Cheese.

It is a commonly held myth that the consumption of cheese before bedtime causes nightmares. Although studies have proven this false, they nevertheless indicated that it did seem to result in an increased frequency of dreaming. Even more interestingly, the dreams appeared to show certain themes based on the type of cheese consumed.

Naturally, the study is by no means conclusive, and some or all of it may simply be coincidence. Without further research, we may never be entirely sure. However, based on my own experiences, I believe that the theory of cheese causing one to dream, if not necessarily have nightmares, is entirely true.