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    Seemingly Random Food and Vitamin Choices

    Filed Under health, lil things, new things 

    About two weeks ago, my Nurse Practitioner suggested I start taking folic acid. While at the pharmacy, I impulsively grabbed a bottle of B12 vitamin pills - for no apparent reason. Since then, I’ve made a half hearted attempt to take the pills, roughly taking them every other day.

    The last three nights I’ve had some really vivid and complex dreams. I even woke up in the middle of the night and resumed the same dream - a very rare occurrence for me. As an adolescent I had dreams like this, but as an adult, I’m either too exhausted or too distracted (or too old?) to dream - or remember my dreams. This morning I woke up and realized this was strange.  Immediately I asked, “What have I been eating/doing differently?” To my knowledge, there’s nothing new in my diet, except the increase in Folic Acid and B12.

    I Googled “B12 and dreams” and a whole bunch of things came up! Turns out there are maybe some links between B12 and memory, and lucid dreaming.

    This sort of reminds me of when I went through a phase five summers ago of suddenly eating cherries all the time. I had no idea why; I just wanted cherries. I was eating about a pound of them every day. Normally I am a solid sleeper, but at the time I was sleeping very poorly. After a week or so of eating hundreds of cherries, I was going out like a light at 10pm as soon as my head hit the pillow; at 6 the next morning I was up and ready to go. Later, I learned that cherries are one of the few foods that naturally contain melatonin, which aids sleep patterns. It really made me wonder about food cravings, and whether my body could have known that cherries would/were help/ing me.

    The interesting thing about the B12 - beyond the vivid dreams - is that I’ve been worrying for a while about my memory. Increasingly I just draw complete blanks about things. I don’t know if that’s normal, physiological, behavioral, or what. I’ll just have to pay close attention over the coming year to see if there’s any improvement.

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    2 Responses to “Seemingly Random Food and Vitamin Choices”

    1. Justine Urbikas on December 26th, 2007 1:03 pm

      in a psychology course I took once I studied something very similar to the idea of food cravings and properties they hold that our bodies could need. i.e. women who crave chocolate around their menstrual cycle and when you just randomly crave something. I definitely think the cherry thing you had going on is a perfect example of this.

    2. Stentor on December 28th, 2007 11:59 pm

      This post inspired me to buy some cherries the other day (though I doubt I’ll notice much difference — my sleeping problems are chronic and I’m generally poorly aware of how my body is functioning).

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