You quit caffeine. Congrats! You kicked one of the most common addictions in the world. And one of the addictions so many of us agree we have, but show little to no concern over. Even though it yellows our teeth, ruins our sleep, makes us more anxious when we’re awake, and makes us feel bad when we don’t have it like any addiction does.
Now you can finally get a good night’s sleep, only you can’t, because ever since you quit, your dreams have become frighteningly vivid.
Writing in The Conversation, sleep researcher Charlotte Gupta and sports performance postdoctoral research fellow Carissa Gardiner say you are experiencing one of the lesser-known symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: intense, vivid, nightmarishly nightmarish nightmares.
Gupta and Gardiner admit that science doesn’t quite understand why your nightmares intensify and become more vivid when you stop drinking caffeine, but there are some solid theories.
Quitting Caffeine Makes Your Dreams Incredibly Vivid
Caffeine blocks adenosine, the brain chemical that builds up throughout the day and eventually makes you sleepy. Once blocked, you’re wired and ready to take on the world.
Eventually, when the caffeine fades from your system, adenosine comes flooding in to knock you out. That’s a classic afternoon post caffeine crash that makes your afternoons at work a real slog.
Another influence here is that caffeine doesn’t just delay sleep, it screws with the quality of it. It especially tampers with the deep, non-REM stages that leave you feeling like a functioning adult the next day.
Over time, your sleep gets fragmented, and your brain misses out on the good stuff—like REM sleep, where you get your most restful sleep and where your most vivid dreams naturally occur.
With those two factors set up, now let’s eliminate caffeine from the equation entirely. Your sleep rebounds. Your body can now dive deeper into REM. And now that REM is allowed to be its truest, most whole self, unhindered from the shackles of caffeine, it can finally start getting weird and hyperreal. Now, you’re more likely to remember your dreams, and quite vividly.
You could’ve been dreaming this way for years, but caffeine was holding back the true potential of your dreams. That all sounds like something you’d see on a motivational poster in a high school guidance counselor’s office, but that’s how it works.
Again, in theory. None of this has been definitively proven. But the domino effect quitting caffeine can cause has a ring of logic to it, given everything we know about how the brain works: less caffeine leads to better REM sleep, which leads to more dream time, which means more chances to remember your wildest dreams.
Of course, we are all different and respond to stimuli in various ways. So your mileage may vary. If you want to dream more vividly, or at least remember your vivid dreams, consider cutting off caffeine 8 to 12 hours before bed. Then sit back, relax, catch some Z’s, and watch your brain spit out some of the most intensely vivid imagery it has in years.
The post Want More Vivid Dreams? Stop Drinking Coffee. appeared first on VICE.
