"Caffiene and Sugar" (fizzy drink) Induced Lucid Dreaming

[AstralFlare]

So just now I noticed that thread about the apple juice making people's dreams more vivid and encouraging lucidity and I kind of wish I had joined this forum a long time ago as I might have been able to share this long before then. Over the past few years there's been an effect I had noticed, not through purpose experimentation but accidental, which severely increased the vividness of my dreams and even made me more lucid. Untill now I had never really thought about it being a concrete way of achieving lucidity even though I recognised it's effectiveness, but after last night I can pretty much confirm that it is. Long story short, I used to sleep with a bottle of pop next to my bed, something like Pepsi or Irn Bru (two fizzy drinks I commonly drink). Often I would wake up in the middle of the night, fill up my glass, drink it and go back to sleep, and this would happen maybe five or six times a night. Every time I used to do this my dreams would be insanely vivid, would encourage levels of lucidity and would even cause me to sleep in way longer than usual, well into the day. I don't know what exactly does it, maybe it has something to do with the effect the caffine or sugar has on my body making me wake up at regular intervals throughout my sleep cycle, I don't know. But what I do know is that it works. Last night I done this again, unintentionally and I have to say I had a breakthrough. For the first time ever, I wrote this in my dream journal: "I was in a shopping mall surrounded by shoppers and for some reason I got the earge to aproach one. As I walked up to the woman I said to the dream character "do you know we're dreaming?" As I told her this, her face instantly changed to that of someone else, this really impressed me and I was extremely happy that I finally asked a dream character this question. But as I looked more closely her face looked devilish and started to scare me, so I turned around and to my absolute shock every single dream character had the exact same face. No matter where I turned the woman was there staring at me like a zombie." It was quite an experience. Something else weird that happened was that throughout one particular dream I got shot in the head during a nightmare and funnilly enough, I woke up! Lol. Inception anyone? It's funny how things can influence our mind. Anyway, I'm going to do more experimentation with this tonight and actually wake my self up at a set time to take my first "shot." I know this works and after reading that thread about the apple juice I'm happy to find that other things work too, so once this pop has gone I'm going to head over to the shop and get me some fresh apple juice to see how it compares. But for those who want something new to try, try this. As long as you don't mind rotting your teeth lol I think you might be surprised at the effectiveness. Hopefully over the coming weeks I can try and figure out exactly when is best to take your first drink, but I can say for sure that I was having vivid and lucid dreams well into the afternoon, I didn't want to get up lol!

[Kaolc]

I'll try this tonight. A bottle of coke is beside my chair right now, so why not? Caffeine would probably be the thing doing this, and since it takes approximately 20 minutes for caffeine to start having an effect from being consumed, and since your longest REM cycle is after 6 hours of sleep, and since it would take around 10 minutes to fall asleep on a normal day, the correct time to take this would be 6 hours - 20 minutes + 10 minutes = 5 hours 50 minutes. This means that you should set your alarm 5 hours and 50 minutes later than your bedtime to get the best effects. I'm not sure about anything, just taking an educated guess. Let me know how it works out and I'll let you know how it works for me.

[Lynn]

I heard it is great for lucid dreaming, but it keeps me awake. My mind races and I start to hear things if I have sugar or caffiene before I go to bed, such as last night. It depends on the person, I suppose. I wouldn't doubt it, though.

[mikeac]

My mind goes hyper-active before sleep when I have soda, but it rarely ever affects my dreams.

[Mindraker]

I've been off of caffeine for about 12 years -- I can't even fall asleep if I drink caffeinated drinks like Coke or Pepsi now. Everyone's body is different.

[imfivebyfive]

I've been experimenting with this technique for the last three nights and all I can say is WOW. My routine is to wake up around 6 hrs after bedtime, then eat a banana and drink a STRONG cup of caffeinated tea with lots of sugar and read a few pages from a book on lucid dreaming. Then I hit the lights and try to fall asleep quickly. I've had one lucid dream each night so far. The second night was a very intense series of false awakenings where I continuously woke up from each previous dream about seven times. A few of those times I became lucid and then would suddenly (false) awaken into another dream! Very very intense. I recommend everyone give this a try. I think it might be might be easier for some people to quickly drink down the tea, soda, coffee, or whatever and try to fall asleep before the effects kick in. If you wait too long you might be awake far longer than you want. I think this technique works on several levels. For one its the standard wbtb response of getting up for a brief time after the 'dead sleep' has burned off (around 5 to 6 hrs into sleep). Then after returning to sleep your are getting a timed 'jolt' mentally and physically from the effects of the sugar and stimulant. Caffeine is a neuro-stimulant so its going to increase attention and focus and also bring you close to the awake state. It's probably disruptive to the sleep state also bringing you closer to waking consciousness. I think the trick is to have enough to provide the kick but not so much as to actually wake you up. So far very intense results when combined with all the traditional techniques (mild, wild, ada, etc). Note: I should add that during the day I don't normally drink any caffeine so that one cup of tea is a very strong jolt for me. If you have a high caffeine tolerance from drinking it a lot the effect might not be as intense.