Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

I used to dream a lot as a kid. Somewhere along the way that basically stopped happening. It’s come back somewhat in mid life but not with the intensity and sticking power that dreams in youth had.

View on HN

I have a wild pet theory that drinking caffeine consistently prevents people from dreaming. Antidoteally, people that I meet that avoid regular caffeine seem to report having dreams on a regular basis. Conversely, the people I know that drink a lot of caffeine seem to say that they never remember their dreams.

I've also noted today many people who take cannabis regularly also do not dream often.

Let me then be the first in your contradictory sample. I drink caffeine more than ever and have consistently been experiencing a higher number of vivid dreams in the past year or so.

Same here. I also find I have more vivid dreams if I'm dehydrated or hungover, do you find the same? (And to add another factor, do you drink alcohol?)

Alcohol suppreses REM sleep, resulting in a rebound effect. This can happen in the same night, resulting in more vivid and memorable dreams closer to morning when, for a number of reasons, we are more likely to remember them.

I drink caffeine but I don't drink it after 2:00 p.m. and have really good dreams sometimes.

Yeah I quit a few years ago and before quitting I very rarely had dreams. Now I have at least one dream every night. Also convinced a few people to quit and they reported the same thing.

Wow, I never made this connection but you’re right - about the time I quit coffee my dreams started again

Did you compensate for less caffeine by getting proper rest at night? Many people quit caffeine at the same time they resolve to get a proper amount of sleep. I suspect getting enough sleep is the causative factor and caffeine intake is a confounding variable.

"Having dreams" in this case would mean remembering dreams. You dream whenever you go into REM sleep, but remembering those dreams requires active training, since your mind is kind of designed to block all that out.

Oh, here's a fun one for you. Have a dream where in the dream you tell yourself you'll only remember this dream because you're about to get woken up. Then get woken up by something you had no control over moments later.

All I can assume is this is a pretty common thing I do in my deep sleep dreams and I don't happen to wake up to remember it.

Absolutely the point, you don't just stop dreaming. I had a period where I would actively make an effort to write down any dream right after waking up, and lo and behold I dreamt every night. Now that I've stopped doing that I remember maybe one or two dreams a month.

This feels like it could be true - I think dreams went to near zero for me around the time I started drinking coffee and tea consistently. But so much else in life was changing at the same time, it's hard to be sure.

Seems like an easy experiment then? Drop coffee and tea for a while and see if they return.

Personally speaking, both presence and intensity of dreams has almost a direct 1:1 correlation with how much I've learned or participated in mentally challenging tasks the day prior.

Most of the times I don't remember having dreamt are those when I've been more or less living on autopilot, with nothing novel in work or leisure time. Recently I've had an explosion of vivid dreams that lines up almost perfectly with doing things I'd not had prior experience with when programming in both work and hobby projects.

I've been on a pretty consistent one cup of coffee and occasional second cup over the course of the pandemic. The only way caffeine impacts my sleep is if I have it past 1-2PM, in which case I find it harder to fall asleep and may wake up periodically but will still dream.

I don't consume any caffeine, and I have extremely vivid dreams almost every night.

The other thing I've noticed is people who smoke a lot of weed seem to report a lack of dreams.

> I've also noted today many people who take cannabis regularly also do not dream often.

As someone who smokes weed I heard this as well. But from experience I still dream, just that its harder for me to remember them if at all.

I don't think you can generalize from your experience. I drink tons of coffee and have wild dreams every night. They're even wilder on the rare occasions I smoke pot.

Conversely chronic chronic users rarely dream and there is a significant rebound effect with cessation of cannabis.

I'm not discounting the potential effect of substances on REM, and as a drinker I'm aware of the deficit during the first 4 hours of drunk sleep. But really, I don't think people are talking about dreaming here so much as the perception or recollection of dreaming. I've made a point of keeping a notepad next to my bed for about 10 years. If someone had asked me before that how often I dream, I would've said maybe once a week. I don't think keeping a journal actually made me dream any more often. It's just that once I really made it a habit to access the halfway state by jotting a note every time I woke up, I became aware that I have 3-4 crazy dreams every night. The only exception is drunken blackouts, but I'd lay odds that's because I just don't wake up often enough to write them down.

Counter anecdote: my partner has been a coffe drinker since the age of 5, multiple a day, even right before bed (cultural norm is South Africa). She dreams a lot. Extremely vivid and remembers a lot.

N=1 counterexample:

I stopped drinking caffeine for a few years (maybe 3?) and have restarted also for a few years (probably 5 now) and I dream fairly rarely both when drinking caffeine and not.

It's well known that sleep-deprived people have shorter and fewer REM sleep periods. So, presumably sleep deprived-people likely have fewer dreams. That doesn't necessarily mean they'd remember fewer of them, but it wouldn't be a big stretch.

Personally, the amount of sleep I get correlates strongly with the amount that I remember dreams.

I suspect caffeine intake is correlated with sleep deprivation bidirectionally. People who don't have the free time to afford enough sleep tend to drink more caffeine to compensate, and people who drink more caffeine tend to have lower quality of sleep.

So, I suspect that it's the length of sleep that's really the relevant factor here.

I've also heard from several friends that nicotine patches cause very vivid dreams almost every night. Caffeine certainly isn't nicotine, but the case for stimulants in general causing a lack of dreams. Maybe caffeine is an outlier in this regard, but, like I said, I suspect caffeine intake is primarily a confounder for sleep deprivation.

I think it is somewhat scientific at this point that cannabis prevents dreams (or at least the memory of them upon waking). And going off weed can lead to much more vivid dreams until one is once again acclimated to being weed-free.

I wonder if there's some sort of neurological catch-up that's being played while this occurs.

Not sure if you will read this but wanted to let you know that I found your theory intriguing and decided to cut caffeine to test.

First day light headache. Second day onward totally fine.

Dreams are back!! Not kidding at all. Over the last few days I’ve had much more vivid and sticking dreams. Some of them bad, but dreams nonetheless!

Thanks for putting forth this theory. I will be reducing my caffeine intake permanently. I beleive dreaming is a healthy part of being alive, and I’ve been missing it.

From the inside it’s impossible to distinguish "not having dreams" from "not remembering one’s dreams". From the outside it’s almost certainly the latter. REM almost certainly equals dreaming, and the lack of REM is a rare condition and pretty bad news.

Apparently young children have more REM sleep (the stage when dreams and nightmares happen) than adults. Babies actually spend half their time in REM sleep (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/baby-sleep/baby-sleep-cycle) before they develop adult sleep cycles, which makes me wonder what a newborn baby dreams about.

Boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And toys probably.

I hope so, but my son definitely seemed to have several nightmares, waking visibly frightened and crying before he was 9 months old. I don't know what kind of nightmares he'd have, as I don't think I ever saw him frightened when awake, and he only cried when he was hungry. (Such an easy baby to take care of, though I needed to manually check his diaper. If he was crying, he was definitely hungry. Apparently many babies cry if they've wet their diaper.) His nightmare were presumably hunger and/or abandonment.

My son also seems to share my abnormal reaction to pain... beyond a fairly tolerable threshold, I go numb. I know I've injured myself somewhat seriously if I feel quickly rising pain followed by numbness. When my tooth got knocked loose, it went numb. The three times I've sprained ankles (once in the woods, 3 days form the nearest hill with cell phone coverage), my ankles have gone numb. The time the cartilage in my nose tore from the bone, it also went numb. Ditto for the time I burned my finger while arc welding (though, I think that time I killed the dentrite back to my spine and it had to grow back out). My son takes a tough fall and other parents look at me like they expect my son is going to cry, and my son just gets up and keeps playing. So, I don't think his nightmare were about pain, either.

He just spent his entire life in a nice cozy temperature controlled pool with a constant IV of nutrients. Now he's been thrust into this dry liquidless, cold, world with intermittent nutrition. Kinda sucks if you think about it.

Everyone has dreams. You must just not remember them.

My pet theory: just because you don’t ‘remember’ you dreams doesn’t mean you didn’t have them. This would result in wildly in accurate correlations (lack of coffee = more dreams, weed smokers = don’t dream). There are always counter examples to any correlation you can come up with which can’t be ignored.

I’ve personally decided my conscience mind doesn’t need to bother myself with what my meatware is doing while I sleep. People tell me I don’t dream because I don’t remember them. I think that’s false. Sometimes I remember that I dreamed for a few seconds after a wake up, then it fades. I’ve rolled with it and intentionally forget my dreams. Not my (conscience kinda) business. When I wake it my turn to go get food and water so we can come back to sleep 18 hours later.

> People tell me I don’t dream because I don’t remember them. I think that’s false. Sometimes I remember that I dreamed for a few seconds after a wake up, then it fades.

I have confirmed this with experiments - I have woken up in the night, written down my dream and went back to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning I couldn't remmeber a thing and the notes seemed like they were written by someone else. There was no 'yeah, i can sort of remmember it" - memory was totally blank. The experiment is fairly repeatable - not every night, but couple times a week.

I thought this was common knowledge. If you google "does everyone dream" you will see about a million articles that say some variation of "we all dream every night but don't remember most of them". It's so common it's like one of those aphorisms or old wives tales you just hear everywhere.

Try studying a subject in real depth for six month, that caused me resume dreaming

This is sort of what I've been dreading myself, that my loss of dreams has been the consequence of a monotone, miserable life.

I have no way nor intention to judge your life. I think it's more about knowledge pressure than monotonous life. you can be havein an exciting life and never exercise your thinking muscles, and a miserable life while learning new things every day, and all variation in between.

as a matter of fact, the six month where I had to learn thousand pages per week were some of the most miserable I had in the last two years because job kept me away from my newborn, it did a number on my health, and I'm barely returning to normal right now.

I definitely associate hard thinking with a tighter connection to my subconscious.

Dreaming also depends on sleep quality and REM cycles. Bad sleep, caffeine, etc, can all reduce or eliminate dreaming...

Alcohol and marijuana particularly inhibit REM sleep and dreaming

Can't quite believe that...references?

This is like saying you can't believe gravity exists and need references.

I mean, haven't checked about weed as I don't use it, but about alcohol it's one of the most well know facts about it, and there are tons of studies, and mentions in every major work about sleep quality, academic or layman level...

https://sleep.me/post/alcohol-and-sleep

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/nutrition/alcohol-and-sleep

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5821259/

https://thesleepdoctor.com/alcohol-and-sleep/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29073429/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25499829/

Limit alcohol, because alcohol is not a sleep aid, contrary to popular belief. While it might help induce sleep, “alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM [rapid-eye-movement] sleep,” Walker says:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...

And, unfortunately, the article doesn't mention any of it. The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream, don't generalize. But the author slyly slinks away from that by saying that "it is likely that adult humans already have well-fitted perceptual models", leaving a bunch of predictions that don't really address the hypothesis, but will be claimed as support when they turn out true anyway.

Basically, it's a very badly reviewed article.

>And, unfortunately, the article doesn't mention any of it. The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream, don't generalize.

Which could very well be true, with a small correction: people who don't dream don't generalize well - their generalization capabilities decline. Or course with people who don't sleep well, their whole mental faculties decline over time.

Even after a couple of days lost sleep, people have been shown to drop several IQ points in standardized tests... and even lower quality sleep can lead to psychosis and worse (which could very well be fueled by lack of generalization).

Plus this "cleaning" process is not the part we remember as a story/dream when we wake: dreaming includes the parts we don't remember, including the botched parts that never fully made it into full deep REM sleep and conscious dreaming. So, people who don't dream will still clean up some of the overfitting, just do a worse job at it...

But did you notice how many confounds you’ve introduced?

I wrote a bit about how to re-engage with your dreams here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/active-dreaming-methods-hab...

There are a bunch of different methods for stimulating dreams.

I usually dream when I have slept really well for a few days. At least for me when my mind is tired I fall into dreamless sleep in a few seconds, instead of several minutes with a soft transition to dreaming.

When I started intermittent fasting and stopped eating after ~2 PM, my dreams became more vivid and felt longer.

I noticed I have a lot more dreams since I replaced my bed with one that gives me better sleep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com