Thread: Difference between having LD's naturally vs using Galantamine/Choline?

I have been lucid dreaming for 20 years and discovered Galantamine in 2014. This was a game changer for me. I am not a natural at lucid dreaming, in fact I always had to work very hard at it and I had to keep my motivation on overdrive. At best, I would get lucid dreams that would last a few minutes, some high quality but most lower quality. I also would have a 25% or less success rate with WILD or MILD (like I said, I was never a natural at it). Galantamine combined with choline made all the difference for me. My success rate jumped to over 80% and the dreams would last much longer. What I find is that I lucid dream chain and jump from one dream to another for an extended period of time. I have even had a 45 minute long lucid dream just a few months ago. So in short, the quality and duration of the lucid dream has improved significantly. I use the Galantamine - choline cockatail once a week on weekends and am quite satisfied with this approach.

Thanks for your response AmicusSomniatus. Other than one low level LD that I had about 15-20 years ago, I've had only one other natural LD, a DILD. That was in mid March of this year and that was after a lot of work to have it. Since then I have been working on WILDs, with a success rate of 6 LD's out of my last 8 attempts. But quite frankly, even though I enjoy lucid dreaming, I'm getting a little burnt out from all the daily effort I put into trying to LD. Just like many people on this forum, I get caught up in trying(wanting) to LD nightly. And I get caught up in the idea that I should not be dependent on using supplements to have LD's. That I will stop using supplements as soon as I get used to the dream environment and then will hopefully be able to LD frequently but naturally. Rather than stop trying to have LD's completely as I have been considering, I think that I will follow your once a week approach and continue to use the Galantamine/Choline cocktail and approach LD'ing in a more relaxed manner.

Even with my once a week approach, I find that I need to take breaks now and then or I burn out. The Galantamine cocktail helps but I still need to keep my motivation up. For that I need to do many reality checks a day using my own dream sign (something I see often that gets my attention). I also need to have great dream recall, read about the topic and basically keep the topic alive almost non stop! I can only do this for a certain period of time before I have had enough. Usually I have a few months of intense lucid dreaming and then I take a few months off where I only focus on dream recall, otherwise I burn out on the topic. I'm at the end of a break period now (which is why I am back on this site again ) and will soon return to intense lucid dreaming on the weekends. During the intense period I can get 3 or 4 lucid dreams per night on Saturday and Sunday morning and the odd spontaneous lucid dream during the week. But during the break period, I don't worry about lucid dreaming at all. That is when I focus on other hobbies.

When you do take galantamine/choline next, maybe try taking a modest dose of melatonin or valerian root (preferably from a tincture or if you want, freshly grind the roots yourself, but tincture is so much easier to obtain--pill capsules are often barely active because the active oils in them are fairly volatile and have dried out). Both of these might smooth the out the frenetic nature of galantamine without really disrupting what it's doing.