The pirate ship’s remains lay scattered on the beach. The pirate King, still breathing, is dripping with salt water, sweat, tears, and blood all over your lap, on which his head is laid. His exposed torse shines in the moonlight. “It’s just us now,” he says to you; his voice is playfully suggestive. “I suppose it’s time for you to plunder some booty,” you joke back. But he sits up and says, “I thought you’d never ask,” and pulls out his intimidating 12 inch...
You wake up suddenly. That was no ordinary dream: that was a cheese dream.
According to the British Cheese board (a leading authority on everything cheesy), eating around 20 grams of cheese roughly 30 minutes before you sleep will greatly enhance your dreaming experience. This works because cheese has significant levels of tryptophan, which the body uses to create niacin, which the body then uses to create serotonin, and everyone knows that serotonin makes you happy. I know this is true because I googled it.
Imagine how amazing your life would be if you dreamt of sexy adventures, instead of the boring old dreams of not being smart, pretty, or just plain good enough. You already know you feel useless and past your prime, you don’t need your subconscious saying it, too.
Luckily for you, we here at Critic have tirelessly experimented on ourselves so that we can say, with authority, how you can take your dreams to the next level.
In the spirit of non-aggressive patriotism, we used a series of five New Zealand made cheeses over a series of different nights. What follows are the types of dreams you can expect from each of them.
Side effects include: Loss of money. Cheese addiction and withdrawal. Fucked up dreams. Sore stomach (if you are lactose intolerant like three of our testers were). We suggest cheesing in moderation.
Night one: Pam’s Tasty Natural Cheese Sticks
Are you tired of people treating you with respect? Have you ever wanted to sail on a boat against your own will? Are you one of the few people who watched all five Pirates of the Caribbean movies and thought “wow what a great franchise”? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you not only qualify for financial compensation, but you should also try eating Pam’s tasty cheese before bed.
Beginning this experiment with tasty cheese (which is the actual name, not an opinion) was quite a spicy intro to dreamin’ cheesy. Several of our test subjects ended up having visions of nautical naughtiness in which they were kidnapped by pirates and taken through many mystical worlds. One subject dreamed of exploring a wacky alien space land, where they were kidnapped by a vampire pirate, who also happened to be Robbie Rotten. There were others who dreamt of rebellion, in which the pirates’ victims fought back and took control of the ship. In fact, even when there were no pirates involved, some dreams still involved being kidnapped and forced to do incredibly embarrassing things (e.g. looking at pictures of that anime phase you had when you were 14 and your parents didn’t understand you). However, there was one outlier in which a tester dreamt of walking down a spooky lane, yet never making any progress to their eventual destination. Then again , spooky lanes are the exact kind of place where you’d expect to be kidnapped. I don’t think that is a coincidence.
Fair warning if you’re keen to try this cheese out, the packaging is incredibly phallic and filled with some kind of weird cheese-lube. So it should cum as no surprise if your dreams end up being PG 16.
Night two: Totoi Blue
For most of our unfortunate test subjects, the blue cheese caused a series of unnerving dreams. According to the British cheese board, cheese isn’t supposed to give you bad dreams. It is possible that the mold-factor of the blue cheese instilled a sense of dread in whoever ate it. One tester said that they dreamt of having a Year 9 maths class reunion (horrific). There was also a dream where the tester’s teeth fell out, which apparently means that you’re scared of growing old. Which is very reasonable because growing old sucks. Old people are legally required to keep at least two kilograms of hard candy on their person at all times, under penalty of death. It gets very expensive. However, what’s more alarming and mysterious is that most of our testers couldn’t remember their dreams at all after eating the totoi blue. Yet, they all reported to have felt a sense of dread or fear upon waking up, as though they had been observed the entire night by a stranger with a strange, obsessive fascination. What scared me about this is that, in this day and age, that is incredibly possible. The other day I fell asleep writing an essay on my laptop and was woken up by the sound of a GCSB agent laughing at me.
If you’re feeling as though your regular dreams are too nice, then the Totoi blue may be just what you’re looking for. Just keep in mind that Critic takes no responsibility for anything that happens to you if you actually do eat the cheese. And don’t forget, if you die in the dream world, you die in the real world. Good luck.
Night three: Edam
Did you know, Edam is made backwards. Is your mind blown yet? No? Ok, well that’s something that you and our Edam testers have in common. Who would have ever guessed that such a common and run-of-the-mill cheese as Edam would produce such boring dreams. Not us. We were actually really hoping that Edam would break free from it’s shackles of mediocrity and rise up as the dark horse of our experiment. So you can probably imagine our disappointment when the most exciting thing to happen was a husky voice narrating the clock tower's destruction by fire. According to the tester, the voice said things such as "there was a fire engine, which was representative of the fact there was a fire engine". The voice probably also sounded suspiciously like the voice of my highschool English teacher. If a dream analysis of Shakespeare’s greatest comedy (Othello) is what you’re looking for, then go right ahead.
However, there was one tester who ended up having not only one, but six distinctive dreams in one night after eating edam. In the first epic tale, John Snow shoots Daenerys Targaryen in the heart, but she doesn't actually die so he orders our dear tester to drown her. Turns out Daenerys has an amazing lung capacity, though, so they eventually gave up and restarted the dream. The second time around the tester is with Deanerys at a barbeque on a warship, and is trying to warn her that John Snow is trying to kill her. Sadly Deanerys doesn’t listen, and ends up dead for good this time. “When you do clownery, the clown comes back to bite”. This is truly an epic tale that rivals the likes of Beowulf and Ragnarok. However, I’m going to say that this was probably just due to a rare mutation which makes the human body actually enjoy Edam. Seeing as we’re not all lucky enough to be mutants, I’ve decided to completely disregard this response. So, it’s with great pleasure that I can officially say that Edam is the basic bitch of cheeses.
Night four: Camembert
Camembert was a weird one. Some of the testers just had weird dreams, which involved such shenanigans as attending a creepy university where no one had a face, which is different to the real life university where most people have two faces. There was also a dream about seducing a cop in order to not get caught with a baggie of weed, even to the point of marrying one to get police wife immunity. As someone once said, desperate times call for desperate measures.
On the other hand there were also a lot of dreams about flying. None of that dangerous Icarus flying either, but proper stable airplane stuff. In the one dream where the flying resulted in a crash, there was Pohutukawa to break the fall of our intrepid tester. For the others, disaster hit only once the plane had landed. For one unfortunate dreamer, they were upstaged at a friend's birthday party when their gift of an egg was overshadowed by someone else’s gift of a much larger egg. And yet, throughout it all, the airplanes were there, laughing and taunting all the poor humans.
So, if you’re the kind of person whose life goal is to dream about flying on an airplane, then maybe you should reevaluate your life goals. But if that doesn’t work then there’s always camembert. Someone once told me that a good camembert takes just like a good dick. Sadly I have yet to find a dick with a deep smoky base and subtle undertones of peppercorn.
Night five: Colby
Eating colby before bed is like participating in a low risk but high reward ritual, where one outcome is that nothing happens, and the other is that you become a literal oracle. One such prophetic dream involved someone releasing a virus which turned people into monsters, who were then let loose to eat a whole bunch of rich evil villains (so kind of like Resident evil, but without a terrible movie franchise). I call this prophetic, because with all of these millionaires and movie stars singing “Imagine” as they livestream their ‘suffering’ in self-isolation mansions, then it’s only a matter of time before us poor people rise up and eat them all. Except for the ones that we think are really cool, like Cher and Betty White.
There was also a dream where a tester saw one of their friends finally break up with their awful boyfriend. It happened at a dunkin’ donuts in a mall and involved a lot of what I like to call, “Screaming and creaming”. Honestly it was just so satisfying to see them take control and just cut the toxicity out of their life... Or so I heard. Anyway, if you’re reading this you’ll know I’m talking about you. You’re too good for him. It’s time to diatch that biatch.
Other than that, the testers who were not blessed with fortune telling dreamt of little to nothing. Turns out that colby is the kind of cheese that either hits you like a train, or not at all. Unfortunately there’s no way to tell what kind of reaction you might have on a given evening. One time you might dream about eating a pie, and the next night you see a vision of you getting bukkaked by the cast of Shortland Street. Life is full of surprises in that way.