Can cheese turn your dreams into nightmares?

Dairy products might be meddling with your dreams: New research suggests that cheese before bed could lead to more intense nightmares, if you're lactose intolerant.

Dairy products might be meddling with your dreams.

New research published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology surveyed sleep habits, particularly dreams, and compared them with peoples’ eating habits. One of the findings? The worse lactose intolerance symptoms people had, the more intense their nightmares were.

The study may offer some answers to questions raised by research from 2015 that looked at factors that influence “food-dependent dreaming” — in other words, how foods affect dreams.

“In the earlier study, people were blaming cheese all the time for their bad dreams,” said Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal who co-authored both studies. “And so I think we got some better answers in the study for that.”

The study included just over 1,000 participants. People who responded that they had severe gastrointestinal symptoms from their lactose intolerance reported stronger nightmares, measured by the frequency of nightmares, the level of distress they caused, how much they impaired daily activities and the duration of the nightmares across months. The participants most commonly blamed their bad dreams on dairy and sweets.