HOW TO FEED MORE BEAUTIFUL DREAMS NOW

Want more beautiful dreams? Try eating a peanut butter & jelly sandwich before you go to sleep. Seriously!

What you eat before you drift off to the Land of Nod likely affects both the content and quality of your dreams.

The most beautiful pre-dream snack just might be the super-simple comfort-food favorite: a peanut butter & jelly sandwich! Check it out...

Folklore and anecdotal evidence yields a variety of advice about which foods can help or hurt your sleep and dreams. And scientific studies are now showing that you not only are what you eat, your dreams are influenced by it. It has been shown in a most pronounced way in studies of diabetic patients.

It turns out that if you fall asleep with low blood sugar, your sleep pattern will likely be interrupted. You might even get nightmares.

A peanut butter & jelly sandwich is the perfect ambrosia for sweet dreams.  

Dr. Gary Wenk, professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Ohio State University & Medical Center, and author of Your Brain on Food, recommends the PB&J sweet dreams prescription.

He points out that sleeping dreaming brain is very active, so it’s very hungry. It needs to be fueled by simple carbs/sugars. While they wreak havoc on your system during the day, the simple carb levels in bread & jelly offer the perfect recipe for sumptuous slumber.

The protein and tryptophan in peanuts & bread boost serotonin levels, rendering a better mood & more stable sleep patterns. Use whole grain bread as your sandwich base. Its higher levels of Vitamin B help tryptophan to convert to serotonin, then metabolized into melatonin, to further aid REM sleep.

In essence, a PB&J excels, both in supplying energy (sugar) to feed the busy brain and in boosting serotonin to calm the brain into deep sleep.

We set out to make the most beautiful PB& J of our dreams to see if this all worked.

We slathered slices of perfectly toasted 9-grain Bread Alone bread with homemade super chunky peanut butter

Then we slathered more slices with American Spoon Sour Cherry Spoon Fruit (way better than jelly!).

We put them together and... voila! A dream sandwich! And yes, we had very, very sweet & beautiful dreams….

Read more about Beautiful Daydreams in A Re-Imagined Dream is Beautiful Now in Dreamland and Honeybees Dream the Sweetest Dreams.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact Daily Fix posts.

Want more stories like this? Sign up for our weekly BN Newsletter, Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr. Join our BeautifulNow Community and connect with the most beautiful things happening in the world right now!

Do you have amazing photos? Enter them in this week’s BN Photo Competition. We run new creative competitions every week! Now, it’s even easier to enter with the new BeautifulNow App!

Plus check out the rest of our App’s beautiful features. It’s free to download here.

 

 

IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: by John Flannery. “Indigo Bunting Eating Peanut Butter.”
2. Image: by syvwlch. “Peanut Butter & Jelly Macro.”
3. Image: by Shira White. “Peanut Butter.”
4. Image: by Shira White. “Peanut Butter & American Spoon Sour Cherry Spoon Fruit.”
5. Image: by Aaron. “Sandwich.”
6. Image: by Theophilos Papadopoulos. “Dream.”
7. Image: by Susan. “Crunchy Peanut Butter by the Spoonful.”
8. Image: by Karoly Czifra. “Sleeping Beauty.”
9. Image: by Shira White. “Peanut Butter & American Spoon Sour Cherry Spoon Fruit.”
10. Image: by Shira White. “Peanut Butter.”
11. Image:  Courtesy of American Spoon. “Sour Cherry Preserves.”
12. Image:  Courtesy of American Spoon. “Sour Cherry Spoon Fruit.”
13. Image: Katie'sCameraClicks. “Midnight Snack II.”
14. Image: by Christina Welsh. “PB&J w/ Banana.”
15. Image: by BN App - Download now!
16. Image: by Ray Witlin. Courtesy of World Bank Photo Collection. “Peanuts. Woman Holding Crop of Peanuts. Mali.