Today US celebrates Thanksgiving, the traditional harvest meal to celebrate family and friends. And most of us that sit at the Thanksgiving table will probably want a serious nap after eating. While the tryptophan in turkey is often blamed for this holiday nap effect, actually it’s more complex than that.
What is tryptophan? It’s an essential amino acid. Turkey has tryptophan. But so do the buttered biscuits, the cheese, the deviled eggs, and aunt’s famous garlic mashed potatoes. Other meats like chicken, ham, fish and beef are high in tryptophan, too. It’s well represented in the dessert category, as well, including chocolate cake, pumpkin pie and banana fritters.
But all this tryptophan is not directly responsible for the family exodus from the dining room to the den. Actually, that’s probably due to old-fashioned carb-loading.
Here’s how it works. All those carbohydrates spike your insulin levels. This stimulates the uptake of large amino acids in the bloodstream — except for tryptophan. This gives you a suddenly high level of tryptophan in the blood, which crosses the blood-brain barrier and enters the central nervous system. From here all that excess tryptophan is synthesized into serotonin. Much of this serotonin is further transformed by the pineal gland into melatonin–and it’s the melatonin that brings on the snooze.
Bizarre Dreams and Lucid Dreaming
What really interests me about the tryptophan-melatonin partnership is that they can bring on bizarre and vivid dreams. About ten years ago, dream researcher Tracey Kahan and associates from Santa Clara University ran a two-week study looking at changes in dream content after taking 6mg of melatonin supplement, compared to placebo. The melatonin-subjects’ dreams were analyzed to contain more “transformations of objects” and “overall transformations.” Kinda trippy.
There’s also a heavily documented link between melatonin and REM latency, the time between REM sleep phases, which is the stage of sleep most remembered dreams come from. Coming full circle, Tore Nielsen and company (2010) from the Montreal-based Dream and Nightmare Laboratory have noted an association between the REM sessions that follow long latency periods and the increased level of nightmares and disturbing dream imagery in general.
This REM effect therefore could make melatonin a potential aid for inducing lucid dreaming, albeit it bizarre and nightmarish lucid dreams. More weirdness in dreams means more chances to recognize “This is creepy and weird–hey, I’m dreaming. And I can fly!”
So is this really all by random chance that traditional harvest feasts involve carb-loading and tryptophan-rich foods, served for days-on-end with the seasonal sleep-overs of close family and friends? I argue that harvest feasts also function as dream incubation sessions. Our culture has set us up to live together, dream together, and share it all in the mornings — just like the old days, if only for a night or two, before we go back to our neolocal lives.
So when your aunt says, “More potatoes, hon?”, that’s an invitation to dream a little deeper tonight.
Yes, ma’am.
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Very interesting info,thanks for sharing it.
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