Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It by Alice Vernon
The two things most of us know about nightmares, according to this fascinating book, are not true. First, they are not caused by indigestion. This pervasive folk belief, Alice Vernon says, was popularized by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who blamed his ghostly apparitions on “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”.
Nor do we have dreams — either good or bad — in black and white. That idea stems from the era of pre-color films and television when, amazingly, only a minority of people claimed that their dreams had color. Since then it seems we have all gone — or reverted to — full Technicolor.
