I started a ketogenic diet about 5 weeks ago, and one of the noticeable things about it are the strange dreams. In fact prior to the diet I rarely used to dream at all, or at least rarely became aware I had dreamed. I may have even gone years without dreams.
Doing some searches on the web suggests it's to do with fats, cholesterol, and hormones. A ketogenic diet is filled with fats which raise your good cholesterol (the kind that reduces risks of heart disease), which raises your total cholesterol. Cholesterol is used to produce hormones, so I am guessing increased cholesterol increases hormones. And hormones affect dreams. I found at least one person on youtube who claims the diet fixed her hormone deficiencies and she could stop taking pills.
My early dreams were almost scary, seeing blood and flesh, I almost thought it was because on the diet I eat more meat, or this was somehow residual from the death of that animal. The dreams were kind of primal, like a feeling of both fear and desire, but outside of those feelings and visuals, I remember almost no detail about those dreams. I don't have theses kinds of dreams anymore, like I evolved passed them.
The other night I had dream where I was grocery shopping, which is something I find myself spending more time doing on this diet, counting carbs and fat on labels. In the dream I was trying to figure out some product on a shelf, I took a picture of it and put it on a social media site and thought/wrote several things and got no response until thought/wrote SECRET POLICE and got a tremendous amount of upvotes. I remember waking up confused why people were upvoting it, was it an affirmation of my thought or do people respond to sensationalist headlines.
Last night I had a dream that I thought would make a strange emotional drama movie. There was a cop who lost his partner, and he had discovered a pregnant women had his partner's baby, but that it wasn't her baby, she was just a surrogate mother, which turned out his partner was gay and participated in an experiment to combine the DNA of another man with his own so they can both have a baby together.
Could be the cholesterol, but I'm wondering about B6. I have clients with pyroluria, who need to supplement with B6. When they're not taking enough, they don't recall their dreams. When they're taking too much, their dreams become a bit hyper. You'll be getting more B6 on keto. But once you adjusted your protein ratios (as you mentioned in our other conversation), and were having less protein, more fat, that might have reduced your B6 again. Just a thought...
That is very interesting! I'll have to estimate my B6 from my earlier attempt at keto and the current food I'm eating. I was very likely deficient in B6 prior to attempting keto since I was not actually trying to have a balanced diet before, and when I first started keto I ate a lot of fish and some turkey and quest bars and small mixed salads with broccoli and vitamins, which all of that had less fat than protein.