Thread: Alcohol

From my own experience, alcohol the night of...will get you jack squat. But for me, the next day when I was trying to recover (past tense applies here, I don't party anymore) My wake induced lucid dreams were soo much easier because all my systems were trying to find homeostasis and my brain was firing funny. I would lay down and close my eyes and within 10 minutes the visuals of a dreamscape would start to form...faces, then bodies, then the environment...then full blown lucid dream. I don't endorse getting shit housed just to try to lucid dream the next morning, but if you find yourself there, watch for the visuals. make surethe room is very dark with only a little light source as possible

Alcohol is known for suppressing your early REM stages. So, as the theory goes, later in the night your body tries to catch up with the REM deficit, which makes your dreams usually longer and more vivid.
Drinking some alcohol in the evening greatly helped me many times to become lucid towards the morning.

I personally don't consume alcoholic beverages. However, it does result in REM rebound much like sleep deprivation. I have trouble sleeping because of my anxiety and circadian cycle disorder. This leads me to have heavy REM rebound. That's how I experience lot of my dreams and lucids in the little time I get to sleep. However, it's not healthy to deprive yourself of sleep or sacrifice quality sleep via drinking on purpose. ^^

I would suggest against drinking close to sleep time, it's disruptive for overall health and restorative sleep.

I wouldn't consume alcoholic beverages just for the sake of lucid dreaming, because I think it is unhealthy. It's not good for your dreaming in the long run.
When I do drink, however, my dreams are usually unpleasant. One time a DC asked me if I was drunk and all of sudden I become intoxicated on that.

I know that this is not strictly answering your question, as you're asking for studies or experiments, but I've found that my dreams tend to be more bizarre after consuming a moderate to heavy quantity of alcohol the night before. If you're seeking lucidity through a DILD, this may be something to consider.

I’m not aware of any experiments out there. But anecdotally, there seem to be such substantial differences among people that you’re better off relying on personal experience than generalizations of other people’s experiences anyway.

I’ve actually been keeping a record of this for a few months now since it seemed to me as if I was getting more lucid dreams on nights after drinking alcohol, and I wanted to see if this was really the case. I don’t have enough data to be worth crunching yet, but so far, it does look like there’s a correlation, though not a dramatic one. However, the most profound and memorable lucid dreams do seem to be the ones from those nights.

As far as REM rebound effect—I don’t seem to get this myself. I actually don’t get hangovers either, presumably for the same reasons: I’m only drinking moderately and I seem to be better at metabolizing it than most people. But if I found it was disrupting my sleep in unproductive ways, then yeah, that would be a whole other story. You’ve just got to figure out if it’s helping or hindering you and act accordingly.

Edit: Sort of off topic, but I think it’s a good idea in general to pay attention to how any food/drink/medication affects the quality of your awareness. If you’re not having lucid dreams already, I find it improbable that ingesting anything’s going to help, but it might be messing you up without you realizing it.

Somewhere on here, I believe we have already answered this question. I still think this is just a bad idea all around. You suppose to be more aware when WILDing, not less. In DILD, alcohol inhibits dreams and memory. Plus: we also, need to have some respect for some of our underage members as we are better off not encouraging this on here. (IMO)