Acid Reflux Nightmare

"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

— A Christmas Carol

In media, eating food can give a character nightmares. Whether it's because the food was eaten in excess or there's something special about the food in itself, the character will suffer from bad dreams — sometimes featuring the food somehow.

It's also common for characters deep in denial to Discuss this trope in order to reject the idea that some obvious symbolism in their dream (for example, a Recurring Dream) actually means anything, or (as with Scrooge in the page quote) that something fantastical is actually happening in real life.

A variant of the Mushroom Samba commonly found in sitcoms and cartoons. Humor using this trope is often combined with No More for Me, as the dreamer doesn't want it to happen again. Despite the superficially similar name, probably won't take you to an Acid-Trip Dimension — different kind of acid, for one thing. Not to be confused with Nutritional Nightmare. Compare Death by Gluttony, The Food Poisoning Incident, and Food Coma for other bad things that can happen to characters who eat too much.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In this commercial for California Raisins, a Claymation version of Michael Jackson blames his weird dream on something he ate.
• In a commercial for the Seattle Mariners baseball team, after the Mariner Moose had a nightmare about being replaced by a latte mascot, Jamie Moyer blames it on the nachos he ate before bed.
• In a commercial for the Brazilian soft drink Guarana Antarctica, legendary Argentinian football player Diego Maradona drinks too much of the advertised product and has a nightmare about being on the Brazilian team.

Anime & Manga

• Averted in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light. When Pegasus wakes up from a nightmare involving the Egyptian God Cards, he at first blames it on the wine spritzer he had before going to bed. But he quickly realizes it probably had a deeper meaning.

Comic Books

• Invoked in Alan Ford: in the volume On the Track of Melissa, the titular criminal is still at large after two whole volumes of hunt, and no one can figure out their identity. Out of ideas, the Number One makes himself a sandwich filled with mustard, cabbage, lettuce, pickles, and tomatoes and then goes to sleep. He does have two vivid dreams (one of which is a parody of Little Red Riding Hood) and obtains some faint clues which eventually help him resolve the case.
• Amalgam Universe: Bat-Thing has Francie Sallis wake up from a nightmare involving her husband Kirk turning into Bat-Thing after briefly regaining his human form, which she blames on eating frozen pizza before bed.
• The 14th issue of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man has Highwater attribute a bad dream to eating chili at 3:30 in the morning.
• Jokingly referenced in Cerebus the Aardvark rather than used. In Guys, Cerebus has an alcohol-induced nightmare involving Roaring Rick Veitch and his Rare-Bit Fiends. This is a parody of Veitch's actual comic/dream journal Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends, which was based off Winsor McCay's comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, whose title referenced the notion that eating too much Welsh rarebit would cause nightmares.
• In the Scrooge McDuck comic The Dream of a Lifetime by Don Rosa, the Beagle Boys invade Scrooge's dreams to steal the door combinations to his money bin's vault. When the dreams (all recollections from Scrooge's adventurous past) get too wild for them they pin it down to pre-bedtime meals.
• The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers had a story where the trio breaks into a prison to free a friend. There's lots of high-body-count mayhem, and when Fat Freddy gets swarmed and beaten by hundreds of police, we see he's dreaming and his two friends are angrily swatting him with a rolled-up newspaper for eating all two dozen hashish-laced cookies they'd baked for a party. Then, in a much much later story, the wake-up scene is repeated, implying everything that happened in that 12-year span was him dreaming!
• Father Christmas: In "Father Christmas Goes on Holiday", Father Christmas gets food poisoning after eating too much cream. The first symptom is that he dreams about his food dancing, accompanied by a cow who vomits up cream.
• This actually drives part of the plot in Gene Luen Yang's Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order. The title character starts experimenting with the sorts of dreams she gets from eating odd combinations of foods, which leads to her encounter with Saint Danger of the titular San Peligran Order.
• One issue of the Roger Rabbit comic book had some bad rhubarb pie causing Roger to dream of a Bad Future where he failed to renew his contract with Maroon Cartoons. Among other things that had gone wrong, Jessica had gone to seed after having to get a second job as a soda jerk, a lot of his Toon friends were struggling to find work, and Roger himself was stuck as the sidekick to an obnoxious kids' show host.
• In an early Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) issue, Sonic chows down on one too many chili dogs and dreams he's "Sonic the Chili Dog", his fellow Freedom Fighters are condiments, and Robotnik was a hamburger. When he comes to, he vows not to eat any more chili dogs... which he breaks five seconds later.
• One issue of the Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, done by guest artist Matt Howarth, features all the Turtles and Splinter having odd dreams but only Donatello's count as an Acid Reflux Nightmare. After eating an entire bag of chocolate chip cheese cookies, he falls asleep and dreams he and his brothers and captured by the Feds and are subjected to nefarious tests and tortures. Meanwhile, a government file regarding them is stolen and sold to a Hollywood director, who exploits it for his own gain via cartoons and toys (A not so subtle Take That! to the original cartoon^note Which, among other things, invented their love for pizza, and their multi-colored masks.). Eventually, the Turtles become prisoners of their own fame and lie around watching TV all day getting lazy and fat. Don then wakes up screaming "Teenage Couch Potato Turtles!"

Comic Strips

• Beetle Bailey:
  • In one strip, Sarge is dreaming about eating a bowl of things that look like Beetle's face smiling at him. He wakes up and swears to never put baby peppercorns on his pizza again.
  • In another Sunday strip, Sarge falls asleep after watching football all day, and dreams he's a star quarterback at the Soup Bowl, paid with food by his team, able to throw off the opposition by burping, rewarded with a chocolate football when his team leads at the half (one with almonds when they win the game) and in contention for the world record for hot dog eating. He wakes up, and says "I have that same dream every time I fall asleep with my hand in the popcorn..."
• Subverted in one Blondie (1930) strip where Dagwood has great dreams after having a pizza with triple anchovies before bed.
• This Dennis the Menace (US) strip from 2012.
• This◊ Dogs of C-Kennel strip had Will dream that Kenny is a snake who swallows him in one gulp, before he wakes up saying, "Remind me to never again scarf down ten chili dogs before bed."
• Winsor McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was an entire newspaper strip about nothing but Acid Reflux Nightmares. Rarebit, (or rabbit) incidentally, is spicy cheese sauce spread on toast; there's a folkloric link between eating cheese before going to bed and nightmares.
  • The strip was adapted into possibly the first Live-Action Adaptation ever, 1906 film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.
  • McCay's strip would later be the inspiration for Rick Veitch's comic book/dream journal Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends, which in turn was parodied in Cerebus the Aardvark.
  • The Little Nemo strips would also sometimes end with Nemo's mother attributing his bad dreams to eating before bed.
• FoxTrot: Happens occasionally, mostly due to Andy's healthy dishes.
  Jason: Mom's making her green pepper, garlic and tofu chili for dinner.
  Peter: Ah, the meal of a thousand nightmares.
  • One Story Arc had Jason going through the events of A Christmas Carol in a dream after being forced to watch it and eat his mother's chili (or similar bad-dream-inducing food).
  • Another featured Roger going through a Polar Express parody after drinking bad eggnog.
• Garfield has these periodically. In this strip, for example, he dreams about himself and Odie washing up on a "Far Side" Island after he eats jalapeno poppers before bed. One Sunday strip has an odd Inversion (the dream gives him heartburn) where he dreams he gets the world's largest cookie, then the largest box of sardines, largest loaf of garlic bread, and largest bowl of five-alarm chili; he wakes up, and needs the world's largest antacid pill.
• In the Luann strip seen here, Luann has a dream that involves King Kong, an elf, a school bus, balloons with Quill's face, and herself as Darth Vader; her New Age friend Dez is trying to interpret it, but Bernice simply thinks it's due to eating flaming hot nachos before bed.
• A Running Gag in Madam & Eve is that eating curry for lunch gives Mother Anderson nightmares.
• Peanuts:
  • This strip from 1965. Snoopy has a nightmare in which Charlie Brown flies him like a kite and he breaks into pieces upon crashing. When he wakes up, he thinks it's because of the pizza he ate before bed.
  • This one too. Charlie Brown dreams about the pitcher's mound being able to talk and thinks it's because he ate a lot of pizzas before bed.
• The Wacky Adventures of Pedro shows some rather trippy, sometimes scary nightmares whenever Pedro eats junk food too late at night.

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles: "The Murder Mystery" turns out to be a bad dream induced by Penny's eating a meat-lovers pizza with anchovies and jalapeños before bedtime.
• In Is He My Father? Harry has a series of nightmares where Snape is his father. He attributes the second one to too much chocolate cake before bed.
• A couple of times in The Look Alike Series by Canadibrit, a particularly noxious pizza is mentioned (so bad, Quinn slaps a Biohazard symbol on the pizza box). In the spin-off and Harry Potter crossover Harry Potter And The Flak Jacket Mafia, this gets amplified when it is revealed that AP ate one with blue (as in ergot-laden) garlic and spent the next little while thinking he was a lemming.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug fic Sleepy Bug, Marinette has a nightmare in which she accidentally goes to school without noticing she's transformed into Ladybug. She attributes this to eating a double anchovy pizza with Chat Noir the night before.
• The MLP Loops:
  • Variant in 136.6, where it's not food that causes it - instead, Twilight gets a reminder of why it's a bad idea to watch The Godfather right before bed.
  • In 143.5, Rainbow Dash thinks she's in one of these (it's really a prank by Spike) when she sees a werewolfified reflection of herself in the mirror, and promptly swears off eating Manexican food before bed.
• While the nightmares in The Loud House fanfic The Nightmare House probably aren't caused by food since Lori and Lincoln note that it's an odd coincidence they all had a nightmare on the same night, the fanfic does end with a message not to eat Hawaiian deep dish pizza if you want to avoid nightmares.
• In one fanmade comic for The Powerpuff Girls (1998), a late-night snack of corn dogs gives Buttercup a nightmare of giant corn dogs turning her into a corn dog and eating her.
• In The Debate Fudge has several dreams about an old man encouraging him to do good deeds, which apparently counts as a nightmare to him. He attributes them to a bad batch of red currant rum.
• Put a Taboo to Use:
  Sorting Hat: Yes, your classes are good and the Quidditch training is a great effort to improve feelings in the school. But I wanted to ask if you've had more nightmares?
  Harry: I have had two, but they seemed so weird I thought they were caused by eating too much pudding after dinner.
• In Harry Potter and the Queen of Slytherin Harry attributes a dream about Mrs. Weasley killing the basilisk with a rolling pin and everyone (including Voldemort) eating cake afterwards to too many sweets before bedtime.

Films — Live-Action

• In White Christmas when describing his theory of how the sandwich you eat before sleeping affects your dreams, Bob concludes that liverwurst would make you "dream of liverwurst." Not a pleasant prospect.
• Referenced for a joke in At The Circus, when Peerless Pauline makes moves on J. Cheever Loophole (Groucho):
  Pauline: You're the man I've been dreaming of.
  Loophole: What do you eat before you go to bed?

Literature

• Older Than Radio: Scrooge accuses Marley's ghost of being a food-induced nightmare (more of gravy than of grave!) in A Christmas Carol. The story leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not this was actually the case, though Scrooge certainly doesn't think so by the end.
• In Diary Of A Worm, when the protagonist has a nightmare about being eaten by a bird, his mother thinks it's because he ate rubbish before bed.
• In one story by Ephraim Kishon. Which leads to a row with his wife, and the next time he dreams of Freud who tells him not to eat heavy food before sleeping. Too late!
• The Golden Hamster Saga: At the beginning of Freddy to the Rescue, Freddy the hamster is awakened by someone screaming "Help! The Hamster Killer! It's outside my burrow!" in Interanimal. When Freddy tells the other animals about it, Sir William the cat tells him he ate too much before bed and advises him to only eat a morsel or two of lettuce for supper in the future. But a few minutes later, there's another scream, and this time Sir William hears it too. The scream turns out to have come from a field hamster that was killed by a bulldozer.
• Gone: Sam has a nightmare after eating canned asparagus.
• Gone with the Wind: On the last night of her New Orleans honeymoon, Scarlett indulges in the rich food, only to awaken from the nightmare that has been plaguing her on and off for several years, which actually inverted this trope, as she would have it due to practically starving after the War.
• Harry Potter: Discussed in "The Philosopher's Stone", where Harry has a strange dream about the Sorting Hat on his first night at school, and the narration speculates that maybe it's because he ate too much, but it's left unclear.
• Mercy Watson: When Baby wakes her up because of the cowboy noises in the yard, Eugenia immediately asks her if she ate pie before bed and tells her to go back to her room.
• In Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Story Girl, the aimless child heroes of the narrative decide to record their dreams for a summer, and begin to deliberately eat rich food before going to bed so that they dream as vividly and crazily as possible. As a by-product, none of them sleep well and they're all cranky and irritable when awake (except for the Big Eater of the group.) When the appointed loser of the group accidentally poisons herself (she lives), the children's doctor bans them from doing it.
• Tarzan experiences one after eating some bad meat in the short story "The Nightmare" in Jungle Tales of Tarzan.
• Brambleclaw of Warrior Cats thinks he had one in the first book of The New Prophecy. In reality...

Live-Action TV

• A post-2002 Halloween episode of The Basil Brush Show involves Basil eating cheese before going to bed. He dismisses warnings about nightmares as an old wives' tale, only to dream that the human characters are turning into vampires and trying to get him.
• A Thanksgiving episode of The Bernie Mac Show has Bernie getting these after eating undercooked turkey.
• An episode of The Big Bang Theory ended with Leonard waking up from a dream about Sheldon reproducing (by prokaryotic fission!) and deciding "That's it, no more Thai food."
  • Which was also a Brick Joke referring to the events previously in the episode where Howard said he thought Sheldon would reproduce by eating so much Thai food (one of their frequent takeout choices) that he would split into two.
• The gag alternate ending to Breaking Bad (where it's revealed that it's All Just a Dream in the mind of Hal from Malcolm in the Middle) has Hal waking up in a cold sweat talking about his nightmare. His wife Lois blames it on a deep-fried Twinkie he ate before going to bed.
• The Cosby Show
  • Cliff has a hoagie-induced nightmare that has him and the other Huxtable men pregnant and ends with him giving birth to a 7-foot-long hoagie and a bottle of soda.
  • In another episode, Claire warns him about this and reminds him of the previous dream when he prepares to eat another hoagie before going to bed and promptly has an even more bizarre dream courtesy of Jim Henson.
• Dad's Army had an episode where Captain Mainwaring has a dream that he is Napoleon after Waterloo and Sergent Wilson is the Duke of Wellington, among others.
• One episode of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. involved both Gomer and the sergeant suffering this after eating Welsh rabbit. While the nature of the nightmare is a fairly tame example - Gomer and the sergeant exchange personalities - what makes it particularly wild is the fact that they wind up sleepwalking and acting it out for real.
• On Hannah Montana, some "Loco Hot Cocoa" causes Miley to have a nightmare which eventually turns into a Dead Person Conversation with her mother.
  • A few episodes later Miley sneaking Robbie Ray's pork rinds leads to an All Just a Dream episode involving Lilly having a crush on Jackson.
• Home Improvement used this several times with Tim and Polish food.
• In one episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy compares her friend Carolyn's modern Chinese furniture to "a bad dream you'd have after eating too much Chinese food."
• In one episode of Mad About You, eating ostrich meat leads to a bizarre Laugh In dream.
• It's implied after the fact that this was behind most of Newhart. After Bob Hartley wakes up and explains his bizarre dream to Emily, she tells him, "That settles it. No more Japanese food before you go to bed."
• Mr. Bean has a nightmare after eating bad oysters at a hotel buffet, where the oysters are green and rancid and a guy he's been competing with makes him eat them.
• My World… and Welcome to It: Subverted in "Darn That Dream." Lydia has a nightmare, which she attributes to eating dinner so soon before bedtime. John debunks this, telling her that's an old wives' tale.
• The Odd Couple (1970) crossed this over with Yet Another Christmas Carol, with Oscar, grouchy about Christmas, getting an Opinion-Changing Dream after refusing to participate in Felix's version of "A Christmas Carol."
• In the Power Rangers: Dino Thunder episode "In Your Dreams", the Monster of the Week comes after the Rangers in their dreams. Tommy blames his nightmare on having calamari for dinner before learning it's happening to the others.
• In The Sopranos episode "Funhouse", Tony eats some bad shellfish and has an extremely long dream sequence where he finally admits to himself that his friend Big Pussy (in the form of a talking fish) has become a federal informant. When he wakes up, he acts on this information and murders Pussy.
• Storage Wars: New York has "The Walking Bid," where Candy had tuna fish before bedtime, and she dreams the Zombie Apocalypse had affected John Luke and the other buyers.
• An episode of The Zack Files had the resident Agent Scully attribute the strange goings-on of said episode to a bad pizza dream.

Music

• In the video for Cheap Trick's "Dream Police," Bun E. Carlos says, "Listen, I'll never eat a double cheeseburger before bed again, really."
• Judy Pancoast: In "Swimming in Jello", the singer thinks it's the pizza she had before bed that caused her to dream of trying to swim through jello.

Puppet Shows

• Under the Umbrella Tree:
  • Inverted in the episode "Yuck!": going to bed hungry because he refuses to try zucchini causes Jacob to dream that he's about to enjoy a delicious breakfast, when suddenly all the food turns into zucchinis.
  • Played straight in the episode "Sweet Dreams": a big dinner full of strange recipes causes Gloria, Iggy and Jacob to sleepwalk and have strange dreams. Jacob dreams that he grows buffalo horns, Gloria dreams that she turns into a butterfly, and Iggy dreams that he grows into a giant.

Radio

• In The Men from the Ministry when Mr. Lamb informs the rest of the General Assistance Department that he has been made the new Permanent Under-Secretary (or so he thinks), Lennox-Brown assumes he's having a nightmare caused by the Stilton he had for lunch.

Video Games

• Garfield's Nightmare: The game's premise is that Garfield chowed down on way too much food before bed (it's actually normal for Garfield to overeat), and in his dream, he has an adventure across multiple dream worlds. Eventually, he escapes the nightmare world and learns a lesson. The food theme continues throughout the nightmare.
• Inverted in JumpStart Numbers. After Frankie eats too many dog biscuits, he takes a nap and has some pretty normal dreams involving being a cowboy, an astronaut and a pirate, though the biscuits are a recurring theme in his own dreams.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, the 2006 Crimbo sidequest starts with you eating undercooked-potato-flavored chocolate and having weird dreams based around Yet Another Christmas Carol.
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: Shantae attributes a bizarre prophetic dream to having eaten an entire tub of cookie-dough ice cream before bed.
• In Hornets' Nest the unnamed main character attributes a dream about orcs attacking his village to too many late-night tacos.
• The Simpsons Hit & Run: In the ending, Homer initially thought that the events of the game were a dream from eating too many raw hot dogs, just for Marge to reaffirm that they did happen. He then asks if "the ninja babysitters" also happened or was just a dream from hot dogs. Lisa shakes her head and says "Hot dog dream."
• In SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab, someone ate a Krabby Patty before sleeping and ended up dreaming the entirety of the game's events. Said somebody is Gary the Snail.
• In TimeSplitters 2, one of the arcade league missions is that a member of the Chicago Mafia who severed the hands of his victims ate too much cheese and dreamt that the severed hands came to life (With bodies made of matchsticks)and tried to kill him.
• You Don't Know Jack: In the 2011 release, the "Nocturnal Admissions" questions would have Cookie tell the player about some crazy dream he had from eating before bed, which always seems to involve him, his cats, and his mother acting out the plot of whatever movie he'd been watching earlier that night, which the player would have to guess.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "weird dream", Strong Bad claimed he had a dream involving the United States in a pair of white cotton briefs after having had nothing to eat all day but thirteen pudding pops.

Web Comics

• Anime News Nina has one strip where the background has been replaced with a trippy purple pattern and characters are clothed in Unmoving Plaid. Kevin attributes this to Nina binging on expired grocery store sushi and Gankutsuou.
• During the Roman War in Arthur, King of Time and Space, Lancelot blames a dream he had about Arthur learning how he felt about Guenevere on Italian food.
• In College Roomies from Hell!!!, Mike wakes up one morning with a tentacle. He insists violently that it is really just a pizza-induced dream. Unfortunately for him...
• The first Narbonic "Dave In Slumberland" strip ends with Dave waking at his desk and blaming the rarebit he had for lunch (since it's a parody of McCay.)
• In The Order of the Stick, Bugbear Oona assigns wildest dreams of seeing monsters to eating remorhaz kebab too close to bed. (Though being a beastmistress, she admires monsters and thus doesn't consider these bad dreams.)
• A Strange Planet strip depicts the dreamer as a nightclub bouncer selectively letting pizza slices in, only for them all to charge past him. He wakes up with a nearly-empty pizza box in his lap.
  "What the unpleasant nonsense."

Web Videos

• Played with in Everyman HYBRID. Part of Evan's dream experiment involves eating various foods before bed. Pizza and hot wings don't do much, as he just dreams about a picnic with his grandmother. Grilled chicken and Doritos causes him to not remember his dreams. A healthy meal causes him to dream of roller coasters. Chicken salad, water, and fruit cause him to dream of a town of children, all of whom disappear. He then dreams he's in the woods, where he hears children screaming. He also finds hanging bags full of blood. Of course, the dream comes true a few days later, suggesting Slender Man was at work...

Western Animation

• Tails occasionally has problems with these in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. It's weaponized in "Boogey-Mania"- after Robotnik gets ahold of a dreams-to-reality machine that brings his nightmarish boogeyman to the real world, Sonic gets Tails to eat loads of junk food before using the machine to create a junk food nightmare monster to combat it.
• ALF: Gordon Shumway's first reaction after the trippy intro to his Animated Adaptation turned out to be All Just a Dream is "no more tabby pot pie before bed!"
• In The Angry Beavers episode "Food of the Clods," Norbert's mix of spicy foods and cheesy fictional B Movies causes him to become a violent sleepwalker who acts out those movies. After Norb becomes a rampaging pseudo-Valkyrie after watching Viking Women from Venus, Daggett decides to fight fire with fire... except Dag accidentally becomes a flamboyant Latin American dancer after watching a commercial for a "weight loss through limbo dancing" program.
• Arthur:
  • In "Just Desserts", Arthur has a series of fairy tale-themed nightmares after he eats too much candy and cake and nods off while listening to Grandma Thora read fairy tales to D.W.
  • In "The Scare Your Pants Off Club", Muffy's parents initially think that her nightmares are caused by the popular Scare Your Pants Off books and they try to get the books banned. It's later revealed that eating hassenpfeffer ice cream was the real cause of Muffy's nightmares.
  • In another episode, Buster says that if he eats pepperoni before bed, he dreams that penguins are after him.
• The Berenstain Bears: Downplayed in "The Bad Dream", where Brother Bear thinks that his nightmare about being chased by a bunch of clones of the villain from a Show Within a Show and a giant banana roll-up was partly due to eating too many honey squares before bed. However, he and his family agree that it was mostly, if not entirely, because he was scared of the character.
• ChalkZone episode "Chip of Fools" involves Snap having a very strange nightmare about being kidnapped and turned into a chocolate chip cookie by alien cookies and his own friends after eating too many cookies out of a chocolate chip cookie tree. He wakes up just in time for the cookie tree to bear more cookies, but he promptly heads for the hills as soon as Rudy and Penny ask Snap if he's ready to pick any of them.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • After Jonny 2x4 wakes up in the Dream Within a Dream ending of the episode "Rock-A-Bye Ed", he decides "No more free-range soybeans before bed."
  • "A Glass of Warm Ed" featured Ed sleepwalking hilarious distances through the neighborhood. While it is uncertain if eating before bed caused this, as he sleepwalks Ed eats virtually everything in his path, from regular foods to Edd's cactus to Jimmy (who is thrown up later).
  • While it didn't really happen while he was asleep, in the Halloween special "Ed, Edd n Eddy's Boo Haw Haw", due to a combination of junk food and too many horror movies, Ed's already loose grip on reality becomes even more unhinged, resulting in him mistaking every kid in the neighborhood for monsters and viciously attacking them.
    • It then became a real nightmare for Edd and Eddy, who, for some reason, were the target of children's payback.
  • Also referenced in "Dueling Eds", which opens with a kung fu school scam, where Eddy uses a mirror trick to make it look like he's created copies of himself. Of course, Jonny was awake at the time, but still.
    Jonny: I think I'm reliving that expired tofu, Plank.
• At the end of the Family Guy episode "Love Thy Trophy," after overindulging on pancakes, Stewie has a Trainspotting-esque nightmare where he sees himself crawling on the ceiling of his room.
• In Garfield and Friends, Jon tells this to Garfield, who has a dream where he keeps eating and growing bigger. Doesn't seem bad to Garfield, until at the end an alien abducts him and reveals that a "hunger ray" was used on him to fatten Garfield up for "alien Thanksgiving". He wakes up and refuses to eat a plate of lasagna. Then eats it anyway.
  • Similarly, in the children's book "Garfield's Cat Nap", Garfield eats a slice of pizza as a midnight snack to indulge himself after being given only a salad for dinner. He then has a dream about an unpleasant future where all the TV sets play only exercise shows and the food comes in pill form. Kind of a subversion of the above example, in that when Garfield wakes up, he's thankful for all the normal food he can eat.
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy feeds himself, Grim and Mandy rotted pizza. Hilarity ensues in their respective dreams.
  • It was sort of subverted with Mandy's dream, a parody of the A Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia, as she was in place of Chernabog. It probably would have been a nightmare for anyone but Mandy. (When she wakes up, she even eats the last piece of the pizza.)
  • A third example, though not happening in a nightmare, involves Billy and Grim turning into each other after they switch roles for the day. When Mandy sees the results, she just goes "I need to stop drinking steak sauce..." and walks off.
• One Gumby cartoon has Father Time accidentally causing various time-related problems for the world because he ate too many sweets before bed.
• In an episode of Hey Arnold!, Helga ends up sleepwalking after eating pork rinds before bed. Twice she finds herself waking up at Arnold's house, the third time she ends up in Arnold's shower, and the fourth time she almost confesses her love for him. For Helga, that's definitely a nightmare!
• Hotel Transylvania: The Series: "Cries and Dolls" has Mavis wake up from a "daymare" and assume it happened because she ate too much booberry scream cheese before going to bed.
• In the Jingaroo episode "Sleepwalking Sydney", too many swamp tamales give Sydney vivid dreams and nightmares to the point that he can't distinguish them from reality when he wakes up.
• In the episode "Only A Dream" from Justice League, Flash initially assumes he's having one of these when he's trapped in a dream by supervillain Dr. Destiny:
  Flash (to Destiny): See you next time I have too many jalapenos.
• In Justice League Unlimited, we have this line when Supergirl is having weird dreams possibly linked to Cadmus:
  Green Arrow: This whole trip might just prove the kid shouldn't eat nachos before bed.
  The Question: Peanut butter sandwiches.
  Supergirl: How did— what, do you go through my trash?
  The Question: Please. I go through everyone's trash.
• The Loud House: In "A Flipmas Carol", Flip has a dream about several kids he knows manifesting as the Ghosts of Christmas. He thinks it's because of the broccoli he ate before bed.
• The Peanuts special What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown! was based on this trope. Too much pizza before bedtime, combined with Charlie Brown accusing him of being "overly civilized", causes Snoopy to dream of living the hard life of a Yukon sled dog.
• In The Real Ghostbusters episode "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Ghost?", the ghost of Olivia Stewart's uncle Horace mentions that rarebit always gives him the strangest dreams.
• The Seven Little Monsters episode "Nightmare on Chestnut Street" has the monsters discussing their worst nightmares, with Three masquerading as a Sigmund Freud analogue to determine why they're having such dreams. After Seven tells of a nightmare where he's made of cheese and gets menaced by giant mice, Three surmises that Seven had this dream because he ate too much cheese before bed.
• The Simpsons:
  • Used as a Framing Device in the second "Treehouse of Horror" episode, "Treehouse Of Horror II", as Homer, Lisa, and Bart all eat too much candy on Halloween, ignoring Marge's warnings, with the three segments showing Lisa's nightmare, Bart's nightmare, and Homer's nightmare, respectively.
  • Also in the episode where Homer eats Police Chief Wiggum's "Guatemalan insanity pepper" chili. A bit hazy on the borderline between "nightmare" and "hallucination", but Homer does wake up at the end of his trippy journey through his subconscious (featuring Johnny Cash as the voice of his spirit advisor).
• In The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol , Grouchy tells the Smurf of Christmas Past that she's a figment of his indigestion.
• Invoked by Steven in the Steven Universe: Future episode "In Dreams," when he eats chili before bed so he'll have vivid dreams, allowing him to use his powers to rewrite the plot of Camp Pining Hearts. It backfires - his dreams are way too bizarre for what he and Peridot were going for.
• Stōked: In "The Reefinator", Broseph gets food poisoning which causes him to have a Yet Another Christmas Carol dream involving sandwiches.
• In Street Sharks, when the brothers are Strapped to an Operating Table and about to be gene-slammed, the one hopes briefly that this is all a bad dream caused by a burrito he ate last night.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode "Nightmare in the Lair" had the Turtles end up in Nightmare Land, where they faced monsters from nightmares Michelangelo got from watching horror movies. When asked what movie a giant spider monster came from, Michelangelo answers that it's actually from a nightmare he got from eating bad pizza.
• VeggieTales: In "The Ballad of Little Joe" (a Western retelling of the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors), Little Joe dreams that his brothers' cactus (cactuses? cacti?) bow down to his. Pa reacts by suggesting that he stop eating bratwurst before bed.
• The Weekenders had two examples where Tino would have a dream that ended with Martin Van Buren on a toy train shouting "Down with the cotton gin! Down with the cotton gin!"
• Yellow Submarine - Frankenstein's monster rises from a lab table, gulps down some serum in a test tube, starts to quake, then, BOOM - turns into John Lennon.
  John: Hey Ringo, I just had the strangest dream.
  Ringo: I warned you about eating on an empty stomach.

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