A KDV Klassik - my 2007 essay on dream-producing foods.
This is about food that makes you dream. I first began paying attention to the effect food has on my dreams in the early 1990s when I lived in Boston Massachusetts. It was the custom of the future Mrs. Nenslo and me to make Christmas Day festive by going to Haim's Deli in Brookline to nosh on knishes. Everything was closed except jewish delicatessens, and neither of us celebrated the season any other way. I was not yet a vegetarian but quite reasonably never ate liver in any form except the chopped liver at Haim's Deli once a year. My response to the burlesque query, "What am I, chopped liver?" would be I WISH. It made the most unpleasant of meats 90 percent delicious. I noticed the first year that my dreams that night were very busy, detailed and intense, and attributed it to the succulent chopped liver. Everything else we had was pretty much potato and cabbage. Every year I had chopped liver and wild dreams. I also discovered around the same time a similar effect from dried turkish figs, the fat yellow ones packed nose to tail in a tidy circular package.
My dreams are usually pretty detailed, busy and colorful, with lots of bicycle and trolley rides through hilly old-world cityscapes or wanderings through cramped twisting hallways that contract into an inaccessible staircase with a light at the end. Occasionally I spend time crawling down the sidewalk using every crack and crevice to drag myself along against incredible pressure, as other people walk normally past. Other times, much more rarely these days, I simply lift my feet forwards and up, and scoot along above the ground, guiding myself with my body weight as if on an invisible skateboard. I made a practice of keeping a dream diary for a few years, but found that reading one's own dreams is almost as boring as reading someone else's.
Last fall I kept bicycling past a tree with huge lumpy pears on it. One day I saw an old guy doing yard work there and asked him about it, learning that it was a quince tree. He gave me a couple and explained in far too much detail exactly how to cut it up without cutting my own finger off, and how to boil it in a little water with lots of sugar. The quince is a woody, resinous and aromatic fruit. That is, it was the vilest fruit I have ever tasted and it smelled exactly like it tasted - like a bucket of rotting lemon rinds. That night I had amazingly happy dreams. I was flying around a pastel landscape like something out of a Barbie in Fairytopia animation, singing joyous songs. I tried it again the next day and it was the same. I decided, however, to forego the heavenly dreams in favor of not having to eat that nasty stuff again, though I came to wish I had stuck a little in the freezer for later. I later tried a mexican style quince jelly, not as nasty tasting but a rather repellent texture, and found it gave a kind of "dirty" variety of the flying dream - not porno, but being swung around in circles at the end of a rope in the middle of a junkyard. I tried this two days in a row also, with the same results.
I found a few months ago that I could relieve minor allergy/sinus/migraine pain by drinking a tea of ground bay leaves, or by chewing one of the fresh leaves from a bay laurel I have in the back yard. I also found that, if taken in the evening, it makes my dreams so busy and detailed that I tend to wake up as tired as I was the night before. This year I also tried quince again, having nabbed a couple of small ones from a tree overhanging the sidewalk on one of my recent perambulations. I chopped them up fine and cooked them with sugar into jam. These were not as powerfully aromatic as the ones I got last year, and the jam is merely sweet, tart and fruity, not vile and resinous. The only effect I seem to get from eating it on bread in the evening is that it keeps me awake most of the night. Two nights in a row I have lain waiting to wake in dreamland flapping my arms and going la la laaaa.... but I don't.
The only other material I can recall which had a noticeable effect on my dreams is marijuana, which damps them down entirely - I would sleep the night through and wake without recalling a thing. A good reason for me not to do it.
