Digestive distress from dairy could disrupt sleep and increase vivid or disturbing dreams, according to new research linking gut issues with nightmare frequency.
United States: Experiencing nightmares when one consumes ice cream or cheese? Your gut might be communicating to you.
According to new studies, those who had a worse symptom of lactose intolerance were more likely to have more nightmares, according to the NBC News report.
More about the news
The study, which was posted on July 1 in Frontiers in Psychology, examined the diets and slumbers of over 1000 people.
According to the study co-author Tore Nielsen, who is a psychiatry professor at the University of Montreal, “In the earlier study, people were blaming cheese all the time for their bad dreams,” US News reported.
Eating Dairy May Trigger Nightmares
— Neuroscience News (@NeuroscienceNew) July 1, 2025
A recent study explored the link between food sensitivities—particularly lactose intolerance—and the frequency and severity of nightmares.
Researchers found that individuals with lactose intolerance were significantly more likely to report… pic.twitter.com/q3KByl3adA
“I think we got some better answers in the study for that,” Nelson added.
It is a sequel to a 2015 research on food and dreams. The respondents completed a sophisticated questionnaire on a course in psychology at a college.
The people who reported large digestive symptoms after a serving of dairy also had more nightmares.
That involved increasing bad dreams, increased emotional upset of dreams, and subsequent long-term consequences, which mostly disturbed everyday life.
Dairy and sweets were the most common foods to blame for the nightmares, according to NBC News.
According to specialists, digestive disturbances might interfere with sleep in the sense that they influence dreaming.
What more are the experts stating?
According to Marie-Pierre St-Onge, who is the director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep & Circadian Research at Columbia University, “If you have GI issues, that could account for a lot of what’s happening in terms of your sleep disturbances that could be associated with different dreams.”
Assuming that an individual consumes a suspected food of his or her lactose problem, this may lead to disturbances of sleep referred to as ‘micro-arousals’ by Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University who conducted studies on sleep and dreams, told the NBC News.
Such disturbances can enhance the severity of nightmares. Nevertheless, professionals caution that the research does not show that dairy has a direct correlation to nightmares.
Others might be some unknown causes. Researchers are also looking forward to testing other groups to have even more insights.