Thread: Melatonin and dreaming

I have not tried melatonin (well, not for very long anyways), mostly because a dream guide suggested I did not need it.

What I can recommend is vitamin B6 in the middle of the night. It's excellent increasing vividness and may even help with lucidity. Also, make sure your diet is high in choline - sometimes I will take a supplement for that, too. For the B6, I take ~12 mg (25 split in half), which is a very safe level from what I've read. You want to be careful with it because long term use of B6 at high levels can cause nerve damage.

If you are going to take supplements, you probably best to ask your doctor before consuming something that may causes you more harm than good. Foods High in Melatonin could help too? Choline and B-12 are good too. A healthy diet will help too. Even that, there is never really a quick fix.

Although not quite the same question, I've received some helpful advice from others here before: https://www.dreamviews.com/sleep-hea...-valerian.html

Originally Posted by MoonOfBacon

Has anyone taken melatonin and saw an increase in dreams or maybe lucidity? Attaining lucidity more with melatonin seems like a reach, but just a thought. I was thinking about purchasing it because it takes me an awful while to go to sleep, but the dream part just popped in my head.

I take Melatonin primarily because it helps me with having slightly more normal sleep. I've been taking 1mg for years, though there was a year or two when I had a break from it, almost needless to say my sleep reverted to being worse during that time.

Though I have some concerns about long-term usage like what I do, there's not much else that helps that I can get easily, too...

I would say it has affected my dreaming, mostly promoting my recall, but the effects in that regard have been variable anyway, and it's actually difficult for me to attribute it any effect on dreaming right now. Sometimes, with medication and supplements, it's difficult to tell what effect something is having until you actually come off it.

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On the subject of general safety of supplements, I think it's sensible to try and understand how the chemicals work with your body, what their half-lives are and what others have reported about side effects and at what dosage levels; and after how long. If you can find a doctor that is actually willing to help you navigate this, great, but it's unlikely you'll find one from my experience.

Personally, I was taking B6 for a while but I stopped recently after reading about how long the half-life is (on average, almost a month) because I don't want to develop long term use issues from using it. If you don't know much about elimination half-life, I suggest you read up about it. But effectively, if you take B6 every day, the amount currently present in your body each day will keep going up rather than remain stable or decrease on its own. This can lead to toxicity over time, usually a year or two but it depends on dosage.

Spoiler for Very pedantic warning::

I haven't found any visual illustrations of this dosage build-up so I decided to make one.

VitaminB6CurvesILLUSTRATIVE-THEORETICAL.jpg

You can click the image above to see it in detail; I have made this small 60 day period graph to illustrate what happens. Do not take it as fact, it is not meant as such because there will definitely be mathematical variables unknown to me and I'm not a biochemist.

Because I do not know how to account for changing average decrease and whatever else, this projection model would imply that it would stay stable after about 170 days, but this is likely a false projection, since we do know that people can get toxicity after long-term use (years) depending on dosage and a changing average rate of decrease in the body could imply that it would simply continue building up regardless after half a year. Yes, it would theoretically taper off quickly at first and build-up much more slowly, but it would likely continue to rise uninterrupted if you took the same dose every single day.

This projection does NOT take into account other things and their overall effect on your health, like physical dependency and other important biochemical mechanisms.

For comparison, Melatonin has a half-life of less than an hour, so long-term use should be relatively safe by comparison.

Overdose of most things can still have serious effects, of course. The bottom line is;
Assume that nothing is without risk, that's what's important to remember.

Melatonin seems to lessen dreaming in the first half of the night, and increase it in the second half. In my personal experience melatonin is not much of a lucidity booster. By the way, it seems the most reasonable dosage is somewhere between 0.35 and 0.5 mg. In the US melatonin is frequently sold in dosages up to 30 mg, which seems excessive in a way that words can not do justice to.

Vitamin B6 seems to be safe in dosages up to 100 mg per day, taken over longer periods of time. 200 mg would be borderline possible for short spells. Anything higher is simply asking for (painful) trouble. 1000 mg most likely causes immediate pain (and the nerve damage pointed out by MoonageDaydream).

These are some good points. You want to be very careful with vitamin B6, and any supplement really. On the forums, I know most of us are happy to give you our opinions on things, so long as you know they are just opinions. I'm certainly not a doctor, and you want to fact-check everything you read before doing something that could be harmful to you.

By the way, I don't take B6 everyday, even at the low dose of 12mg. I take it maybe 1-2 times a week, only if I'm going to go for a WBTB. I don't think it is harmful at this quantity, but please be careful.

Here is some helpful reading: Helpful Reading. On this website it seems to suggest that the upper safe limit is 100mg/day for adults. It also gives some food options if you would like to look at natural ways of boosting B6.

I second that, MoonageDaydream.

I sometimes try to raise my acetylcholine levels through what I eat. I love cheddar cheese and scotch eggs, and recently I've seen a surge of lucid dreams. But I would not say these foods induce lucidity per se. They may increase REM periods and boost memory—which interrelates with consciousness—and lately I've been recording ordinary dreams and listing recurrent, potential dream signs.

I would say that, in my case, all these factors combined (as part of my jolly effort) contributed in promoting lucid dreaming.