On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:50:23 -0700, Wally Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Normally I eat pretty low carb during the week and
>naturally increase my carb intake slightly over the
>weekends. This past Saturday and Sunday, however, I
>*really* increased my carb intake - mainly because I
>had a craving for fruit and fruit juices. What
>happened really intrigued me. On both nights I had
>really vivid, yet nonsensical dreams.

Congratulations.
This sounds like a tryptophan/serotonin experience.
Serotonin and its predecessors are supposed to hilight dreams and dream
recall like you described.
There's a newsgroup ( alt.dreams.lucid ) where a man
reported to achieve a lucid dream frequenc< of 1 per 2 nights by taking
5-htp (a intermediate between tryptophan and serotonin).

The thing is connected to carb intake as follows:
Tryptophan needs to be shipped to the brain to make serotonin and melatonin
there (necessary for sleeping and dreaming).
But tryptphan competes with 4 other amino acids for one transport protein to
the brain - so it matters how much TRY relative to the other AA's is present
in the blood.
A higher carb meal helps to decrease the other 4 amino acids so more TRY
gets to the brain -- more serotonin -- more melatonin -- more dreams and
more interesting dreams.

I think that could explain your experience.

The last protein intake should be a little away from the carbs (1-2 hours).
There's also the possibility to eat proteins with a naturally higher
tryptophan percentage - (winged beans - sesame - wild game...).

I have written a little about tryptophan on this list (there's a link to it
on my web-collection http://www.geocities.com/paleolix/
I also have a little lucid corner on the page with some books
and websites I liked)

>Has anyone else had an experience like this?

I lack the vividness.
What did you eat that day?

Thanks for the interesting detail about red hot chilies, Mary.
If I think back... may be for me too.

Good night

ehm Good day is comeing first :-)

Cheers,

Amadeus