Nicotine Patch Experiment
I'm a habitual smoker. I've lessened my load to about half a pack a day recently and honestly that's probably on my better days. Nicotine and nicotine addiction are nothing new to me. One of the easiest ways I hear to quit, which at this point, I have little interest in doing (at the moment anyway, I will quit sooner than later) is through something called a nicotine patch. For all you non-smokers, nicotine patches are patches you stick on you, pretty much like band-aids, that send nicotine into your bloodstream without all the toxic chemicals they put into cigarettes. It's essentially a safer way to get that hit while you slowly wean yourself off cigarettes.
As we all know, learning to remember your dreams and thus learning the recurring themes or images is vital for the inexperienced lucid dreamer to obtain lucidity. But many of us cannot remember our dreams without using some sort of technique, unless of course the dream is absolutely insane or vivid. But what if you could skip the memorization techniques, and on call experience dreams so intense and vivid it's unlikely that you could ever forget them, even if you wanted to?
Well, as it turns out nicotine patches might be the answer. Apparently, nicotine patches, when applied during sleep hours, almost universally create the greatest most vivid dreams the likes of which many of us would never otherwise experience in our entire lives. Sounds crazy?
Leonardo DiCaprio once said:
"When I take nicotine patches I have blood curdling nightmares of murder. Mass murders. I wake up in the middle of the night and have to take them off...I don’t really remember my dreams that much apart from then. I don’t know what that means about me from a psychological point of view but that’s the truth."
The actor isn't the only one who's known to experience this. Just do a google search of 'nicotine patch dreams', almost everyone who's ever taken it while asleep reports the worst types of hellish nightmares imaginable.
So, it's got me thinking, what if, as an inexperienced lucid dreamer myself, and as an already addicted smoker, I tried them, but only when about to sleep, and used any abnormal details I see as a jump into lucidity. I mean think about it, during your most troublesome nightmares, aren't you more likely to realize you're dreaming when there are literally dozens of DSs all around you at once? At the very least, you'll have some crazy vivid dreams, bad or not, and from them maybe could pick up some memorable cues for later RCs.
I think I'm going to try it. Tell me if you're interested and maybe I'll post a dream journal or a video blog. If not, I'll keep the experiment to myself, no biggie.
And most importantly if there are any risks in doing this, aside from the most basic addiction-related risks, then I'd prefer to hear about them BEFORE trying this out. I'm new at this site and I wouldn't want to screw up any future endeavors simply because I started out with a bad idea.
One last thing - I am also aware that I am not the first user here to utilize nicotine patches, I am however the first without any previous LD experience. I have had maybe 2 LDs in my entire life which were both extremely short and disappointing. So naturally I'm much more interested in how effective this technique would be for an absolute beginner. If it works, it'd be kinda like training wheels.
