Thread: Carbamylcholine Injection: Chemically-Induced REM Sleep

I am only bringing this up for conjectural discussion, as this is probably not something people should be messing around with.

Today, I stumbled upon this article: Carbachol Models of REM Sleep

It goes to say that you can chemically-induce an REM-like stage of sleep by injecting a small amount of carbachol (a muscarinic receptor agonist) into the pontine reticular formation, located in the brain stem. So far, I can't find any information on clinical trials that involve humans; it has only been officially tested on rats and cats, but the results seem to be very consistent.

During the process, it's hard to say if the animals were actually dreaming—which would be incredible—or simply experiencing the atonia and eye movements.

Pretty interesting, eh?