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Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

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61–70 of 231 posts

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#61

I've lucid dreamed a few times, and every time I am able to summon a "debug menu". Sort of a drop-down menu with all of the dream parameters. I can never think of anything more interesting to try than Physics>Gravity>moon. I turned off collisions once, and spent like twenty minutes just putting my hands through walls and giggling.

Import celebrity > Gal Gadot Clothes > Off Libido > Increase by 200%

There is an anime series with something similar to this as one of the premises, 'Overlord'. Near the beginning, the protagonist uses superuser powers to reprogram a cute but hateful character in a VR game so they are in love with him.

It goes rather less well than he expects. Great series, incidentally.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#62
post #57
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I noticed I was dreaming and tried flying. It worked for a second until I was pulled back to the ground by an invisible, irresistible force. Trying to fight it just woke me up." This may be a Can't Unread sort of thing for some people, but... flying in my dreams is now a source of frustration for me since I noticed that no matter how "high" I fly, there is always something on the horizon higher than me. If I fly ove…

You might try exploring the emotion you are left feeling after the recurring experience. I’ve found that my dreams are a space for me to integrate experiences.

I understand the emotion just fine. It is superficial frustration from wanting to be able to do something and not being able to. The solution is just to let go of it. Sleep and dreaming being what it is, I often do not remember that this is a problem until I wake up a bit more enough to remember "oh, yes, this is a problem".

Many people certainly seem to dream about issues of great significance to them. I have before, but it is by far an exception and not the rule. My dreams give me a window into how I conceptualize the world and how I break things down and store them, but it's actually quite unusual for me to have anything that can be traced back to specific emotional experiences.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you likely haven't lucid dreamed, because it's a you-really-know-it feeling. You realize you are dreaming "Oh, I'm dreaming right now. I'm lying in my bed, and dreaming this place", and you can decide to do things - but you also have to be careful not to become too lucid and wake yourself up (usually I do this by calming myself down) and not to fall into a "real" dream (I find that spinning in circles makes y…

I had a dream where I was in my bedroom and noticed that it was arranged in an old way that I had since rearranged a month ago. I suggested to myself that I was in a dream and tried to wake myself up. I woke up into yet another dream where the room was in its current arrangement. I woke up shortly after for real this time, into reality. I woke up to the sun beaming through the window into my eyes. Maybe I was more lu…

Are you in control right now? Leaving the deep philosophical questions aside, you can have the same kind of control in a dream. As in, you feel 100% (or sometimes much more) awake, alert, and in possession of your full waking capacities, but what surrounds you isn't the physical world.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#64
"Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness..."

Like anything else, it's only remarkable until you've understood and experienced it. I look forward to the time when this is considered a normal state of consciousness and is just something people do to enhance their life experience.

We in the west have a pretty weak relationship to the limits of consciousness. It's great to see this changing with studies like this popping up more frequently.

That said, I've only achieved mixed results with my lucid dreaming experiments as I found the training to hamper my energy the next day. I'm going to give galantamine a try and see if I can get some more consistent results.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#65
post #7

I’ve only ever had a small number of lucid-like experiences. I only remember my dreams 4-5 times a month, but those few lucid experiences were wonderful. If anyone has any advice that’s worked for them on stimulating (lucid) dreaming, I would love to hear it.

https://www.iamshaman.com/eshop/catalog/480.htm Just pepper your angus bruh. The effects of this stuff lasts 4 to 6 months after only smoking it a few times.

I used to smoke the leaf occasionally. The next two nights I'd have insane amounts of dreams, but also not feel properly rested, like it kept you at a lighter level of sleep. Which makes some sense.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#66

Just throwing this out there. I've had hundreds of lucid dreams and it's the most amazing experiences I've have in my life. It takes practice to 1) figure out you're dreaming with some level of reliability 2) learn to take control 3) train yourself not to get too excited so you don't wake yourself almost immediately. I believe the first step is to train yourself to recognize a dream. It becomes easier once you've don…

Ever do one of the tests to see if you are in a dream and find out that you are awake? I've always been a little scared that I would be awake, think I'm in a dream, and then do something stupid, like try to fly.

When I've flown in my dreams, it always begins by zooming up from solid ground, not by leaping off a roof or out a window.

So, no harm in accidentally trying to fly in reality. Except looking weird.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. I want to say I've had both types of dreams, but as you're pointing out, how could I know for sure? I will say that when I'm having a genuine lucid dream, after I wake up, I know without a doubt it was a lucid dream. With regular dreams, I look back on them and don't exactly identify with my "dream self." That guy didn't realize how absurd the scenario was. He resembles me, but he wasn't me. Wit…

I wonder how lucid dreaming compares to a phenomenon where (A) we dream that we know we are dreaming and (B) it happens to line up with reality enough that we are convinced we had control. Maybe philosophically there is no difference. But it would certainly dispel a lot of the folk magic around lucid dreaming.

The way that genuine lucid dreaming differs from those scenarios is that it's been shown empirically that the dreamer is in fact aware that he is asleep and is dreaming.

Check out Stephen LaBerge for more info. They found that while asleep, a person is basically paralyzed with exception to their eye movement. In a lab setting they were able to have the dreamer use a signal, using eye movement, that they were dreaming.

One thing they did was to test the theory that subjective dream time is different than time experience while awake. They did this by doing the eye signal, counting down 10 seconds, and then signalling again. They found that there was no "time dilution" when compared to wakefulness.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#68

Tangentially related, but if anything "magical" exists, lucid dreaming is the way to it. Egyptians were supposedly obsessed with being lucid during dreams so they don't "lose" themselves in the afterlife. Seems quite logical, since you essentially lose track of yourself during a dream.

Indeed. The Tibetans claim that this is all a dream, and that the only way to confirm this for yourself is to wake up. Until then, because all of the internal dynamics follow rather precise and well-defined laws (i.e., correlations), it is easy to be fooled into thinking that it is real and external. In actuality, it is all made of "your" mind, in the same way that a dream environment is made of "your" mind. "Your" is in quotes because it is not the mind of the dream character, but of the dreamer. Ultimately the character discovers that the two are the same, by introspecting precisely.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#69
post #12

Has anyone taken Chantix to quit smoking? I did about 10 years ago and it gave me the craziest most vivid dreams and nightmares.

Yes. I dreamt I was sending psychic messages out of a dream, and woke up, and sent an SMS to apologise for the psychic message, and woke up again. So attempting to communicate out of dream layers two dreams deep. Woke up to what I believe is reality. Am there still.

I've had this weirdly commonly (without Chantix ... just maybe some sleep deprivation), if you replace "psychic messages" with texts or other online messages. Though amusingly, "psychic messages" and "online messages" don't really seem so categorically different in this context.

Re: Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a dream where I was in my bedroom and noticed that it was arranged in an old way that I had since rearranged a month ago. I suggested to myself that I was in a dream and tried to wake myself up. I woke up into yet another dream where the room was in its current arrangement. I woke up shortly after for real this time, into reality. I woke up to the sun beaming through the window into my eyes. Maybe I was more lu…

Are you in control right now? Leaving the deep philosophical questions aside, you can have the same kind of control in a dream. As in, you feel 100% (or sometimes much more) awake, alert, and in possession of your full waking capacities, but what surrounds you isn't the physical world.

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