Very short lucids w Galantamine and Alpha-GPC?

[2Jupes]

Has anyone found a solution for very light sleep with these aids? I had read that B5 can cause frequent awakenings so stopped the supplement. Last night I woke up at 5am and took 8mg galantamine and 300 mg Alpha-GPC. I tried to WILD for about thirty minutes then had a series of eight dreams or so because I kept briefly waking. In one I did a failed nose check and grr didn't get lucid. Then I finally became lucid in a dream when I realized I had been wearing a sleep mask and it lasted about three seconds. I tried to WILD again, dreamt of being in a classroom, woke up, managed to DEILD and became lucid, saw a new dream scene approaching me from a distance, called out for a particular room to form, it did and I was awake again. I had something like ten or twelve dreams in three hours because the sleep seemed so light. Has anyone experienced this or heard of dosage issues or other supplements to solve this problem? The exciting thing about galantamine for me isn't getting lucid but prolonging dreams so this is frustrating.

[2Jupes]

Maybe there is no solution. I added .3 mg melatonin today and had one very short lucid where I stood my dream body up, tried to change scenes and immediately woke. Maybe if I'd stopped, stabilized and been patient this wouldn't have happened but it seems like galantamine sleep is super light

[FryingMan]

There's no mistake about it, galantamine + cholines (bitartrate, alpha gpc) is *tough* for light sleepers -- I have not yet (20+ attempts?) gotten right back to sleep on G+Ch, and sometimes never do. When I do it's a 3-5 hour battle with maintaining the discipline to stay relaxed enough to wait for sleep without giving in to the temptation to daydream. It's like a marathon meditation session. The resulting lucids are so cool, though, that it is worth the investment and the occasional 1/2 night of lost sleep. I have not yet experimented sufficiently much with larger amounts of melatonin: even 1mg is not enough to overcome the stimulating effect of G. Galantamine and alpha-gpc I find stay in the system, effective (perhaps not at the peak) for 2 days. So I've gotten this idea to try taking galantamine + alpha GPC in the *morning* after waking up, so that their stimulating effect is applied to my waking day rather than to my sleeping night. Experimenting like this with daytime galantamine may be the answer for light sleepers (or slow-to-sleepers) like us. Galantamine can indeed help in prolonging dreams by helping you to get lucid immediately at the beginning of a dream.....as long as you can get to sleep at all, that is!

[EmoScreamo]

Intuitively I would suggest to reduce the dose. Maybe 4 mg of Galantamine and 150mg would work as well? Or maybe reducing the sleeping time before the WBTB period?

[2Jupes]

Last night was the day after my galantamine dose. I also took piracetam if that matters. I had three lucid dreams last night, all of them ending almost immediately after I successfully reality checked. I'm managing to sleep, but these lucids are super fragile, which I thought was the opposite point. I'll try 4mg next time though. I have orderered some Huperzine A as a possible substitute for galantamine, as well as l-dopa and Yohimbe so I can try the various Advanced Lucid Dreaming combos.

[ThreeCat]

I agree that a smaller does of G might be effective. Also, there are reported substitutes (though they are probably not as effective): Hup A, L-theanine, and other amino acid blends (I think Yuschak has a paper on this floating around on the forums somewhere). L-theanine apparently promotes alertness as well as relaxation, which would assist with falling back asleep, in my mind. When I took G, I went STRAIGHT back to sleep, so that my body did not have time to go through a normal wake-up. I would say to keep it by the bed, with the water. Maybe keep the choline in a little pill jar that you can just shake into the water or whatever, and don't turn on any lights. I would definitely not get out of bed, or open the fridge, or do a proper WBTB. I also would not sweat trying to WILD at first. Just go back to sleep. Once you have a wake-up, you will be in a better place to WILD (so thinks me) and may even do it without trying. So that's my advice on navigating the G. As for yohimbine, from what I understand, the dosage for that needs to be incredibly low, or you will not sleep at all.

[FryingMan]

When I took G, I went STRAIGHT back to sleep, so that my body did not have time to go through a normal wake-up. I would say to keep it by the bed, with the water. Maybe keep the choline in a little pill jar that you can just shake into the water or whatever, and don't turn on any lights. I would definitely not get out of bed, or open the fridge, or do a proper WBTB. I also would not sweat trying to WILD at first. Just go back to sleep. Once you have a wake-up, you will be in a better place to WILD (so thinks me) and may even do it without trying. I do precisely this! I prepare a bottle of water and a little cup with the pre-measured portions of supps. At the alarm/waking at the right time (usually no later than 4 or 4.5 hours), I sit up, pop the pills, drink the water, and immediately lie back down in bed. I never bother with WILD: I aim for sleep immediately. Five hours later, I *might* fall asleep if I'm lucky. I'm going to experiment with evening/afternoon G and see how it works for me, to give the peak stimulation effect time to wear off. Also I can try with much larger doses of melatonin and/or L-theanine, both at bedtime and at G time. But large doses of bedtime melatonin sometimes promotes insomnia halfway through the sleep. I'll also experiment with heavy exercise during the day to really go lights out during the night on nights with G.

[2Jupes]

I appreciate that I'm getting lucid with this stuff at least momentarily, but I really wanted to use these substances to get my feet wet with WILD. Those automatic insane transitions you read about seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I was awake three hours the first time I tried. Now I do the same bedside dosing with little movement and I'm sleeping within the hour. But nothing exciting in terms of WILD. So while I'll experiment w lower doses, I'm wondering if more might actually be better. So much conflicting info out there. I was hoping there was a substance that might promote "deeper" REM sleep, but maybe that's an oxymoron.

[2Jupes]

I felt safe taking another run after two days because I've been using Piracetam to counter desensitivity. I took 4mg galantamine with about 200mg Alpha-GPC after about three and a half hours of sleep. I had incredibly long and vivid dreams, somehow not getting lucid. The lower dose seems to gain more stable sleep at the expense of losing the impulse to get lucid maybe. The other problem here is that I've been waiting for choline bitarate in the mail and I'm only using Alpha-GPC. GPC takes several hours to reach peak plasma, whereas bitarate takes about an hour, mirroring galantamine. I'm open to the idea that I'm also just screwing up my lucids by getting too excited and not stabilizing correctly. Will take a few days off and try with the choline bitarate next time with 4mg galantamine.

[ThreeCat]

I do precisely this! I prepare a bottle of water and a little cup with the pre-measured portions of supps. At the alarm/waking at the right time (usually no later than 4 or 4.5 hours), I sit up, pop the pills, drink the water, and immediately lie back down in bed. I never bother with WILD: I aim for sleep immediately. Five hours later, I *might* fall asleep if I'm lucky. I'm going to experiment with evening/afternoon G and see how it works for me, to give the peak stimulation effect time to wear off. Also I can try with much larger doses of melatonin and/or L-theanine, both at bedtime and at G time. But large doses of bedtime melatonin sometimes promotes insomnia halfway through the sleep. I'll also experiment with heavy exercise during the day to really go lights out during the night on nights with G. FM, do you think this has anything to do with excitement, at least in the first twenty minutes or so? I'm wondering if by the time you settle down, the galantamine has already taken effect. Hmmm.

[FryingMan]

FM, do you think this has anything to do with excitement, at least in the first twenty minutes or so? I'm wondering if by the time you settle down, the galantamine has already taken effect. Hmmm. In the beginning yes, after the 20th time, no. I absolutely feel mentally different on G+Ch. Which is the point, isn't it? I'm just the sort where even very very light mental activity keeps me wide awake (making WILD very very tricky, BTW). It takes iron will and discipline to keep my mind empty in order to get back to sleep sometimes, but on galantamine my best efforts at my tried and true relaxation-for-sleep techniques just don't cut it so far. It's like all drowsiness totally evaporates.

[2Jupes]

Tonight was my "day after" galantamine and I took about 60mg of l-dopa around midnight, then wbtb and had 500 mg of choline bitarate around 4am. No problem going back to sleep and had wildly realistic dreams. No lucidity though. The one I just woke from involved a musician playing impromptu violin riffs for a reporter in a car and I can still hear them. Not the key to WILD I was looking for but really entertaining at least.

[2Jupes]

In case anyone is having similar problems I will say that I had a nice lucid this morning after WBTB and 200mg of l-dopa. Thereafter, I nearly entered six separate dreams but they wouldn't hold. I'll be receiving some Huperzine A as a substitute for galantamine this week as well as some l-theanine, hoping it will settle me a little more in dreams.

[FOATL]

smh...

[2Jupes]

Care to expand?

[EmoScreamo]

I heared that G is more effective than hupperzine A because Galantamine will stimulate your nicotinic receptors. Hupperzine A just increases your Acetylcholine levels. I don't know anything about tolerance effects, I think Yuschak said that these supplements will only work once in a week. I also had great success with L-Dopa but had some side effects of being more agressive ( maybe because of the testosterone )

[Verre]

It's like all drowsiness totally evaporates. Apart from lucid dreaming, my favorite uses of Galantamine are for combating jet lag and driving cross country, for this very reason! If I'm actually trying to go to sleep, one of the more disturbing side effects is the way it makes my heart pound. Galantamine is a hell of a stimulant! I used it a lot a few years ago, and back then I had a lot of trouble falling back to sleep on it too. I always found that L-Theanine was a big help in allowing me to fall asleep on Galantamine without disrupting REM. (I wouldn't use melatonin for this purpose since it can inhibit REM.) I really disliked the "hangover" from Galantamine the next day, though. Apparently not everyone gets this, but in my case it seemed like any sleep I got while on Galantamine (4 or 8mg) was not the slightest bit restful, so I would wake up really groggy and with an unusual feeling that my senses were heightened--colors and sounds and scents all seemed more vivid. That part was cool, but the brain fog that invariably came with it was awful. Piracetam worked wonderfully to clear out the fog: within moments after drinking the Piracetam solution, it felt like I was bathing my fevered brain in cool water. I got all my info from Yuschak's book so for a long time I took his word that Piracetam was a dream inhibitor, until I had some vivid LDs right after taking it. After that I started using it as a trigger instead of Galantamine (together with Alpha-GPC, which I used with both) and in the long run I liked it much better overall.

[FryingMan]

Interesting about piracetam. I just couldn't get myself to order it though: drugs to get me "up", drugs to get me "back down," it all seemed like too much. But yeah, galantamine definitely does give me that pounding heart thing. I don't know if it's the G or the B5 that's keeping me awake, though. I tried some before-bed galantamine (about 5 hours before bed) and alpha-gpc (closer to bedtime) a few nights ago and as an experiment and it led to a rather astonishing long night of dreaming, where I woke and felt absolutely terrible, like I hadn't rested at all. It was like I was either dreaming or recalling dreams the entire night, and they were so long I could barely keep them in my head at once, and in fact forgot a lot of the earlier sequence of the two. The second night was a zero recall night, where it was like NREM rebound or something: only deep sleep and no dreams at all, upsetting and bizarre in its own right since I *always* recall at least a little bit. Also exhausted for the day after that. Anyway, I'm really getting tired (literally) of the side-effects of these things.

[2Jupes]

I heared that G is more effective than hupperzine A because Galantamine will stimulate your nicotinic receptors. Hupperzine A just increases your Acetylcholine levels. I don't know anything about tolerance effects, I think Yuschak said that these supplements will only work once in a week. I also had great success with L-Dopa but had some side effects of being more agressive ( maybe because of the testosterone ) I had somehow not read Yuschak's 16-page paper on the subject until just last night, and I see now that Galantamine and Huperzine A aren't just generic acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, but they have other unique properties. I guess I'll be trying Huperzine A with nicotine tonight if my shipment shows up. Really hoping the l-theanine takes the edge off and stops the ultra-short lucids. I'm not sure that forum etiquette is, but I found a pdf of his paper on bluelight.

[2Jupes]

I got all my info from Yuschak's book so for a long time I took his word that Piracetam was a dream inhibitor, until I had some vivid LDs right after taking it. After that I started using it as a trigger instead of Galantamine (together with Alpha-GPC, which I used with both) and in the long run I liked it much better overall. I've felt the same way, and it bothered me that he issued a paper on Huperzine A, etc. after only trying it four times. I appreciate he's doing the research, but it seems so rushed and untested. He's one person with a particular base brain chemistry, and particular WILDing skills. I have never noticed a problem with dream recall on Piracetam. The substance I'm most interested to try should come in the mail today: Coluracetam

[EmoScreamo]

I heared that nicotine will stabilize the REM-Phase. So this could be a good idea. (Ex-Smokers should be careful). I used 1/6 of a strong nicotine patch and it was almost too heavy to fall asleep. But I got lucid during the dream.

[2Jupes]

I just had my first WILD using galantamine l-theanine and nicotine! So crazy! It's 5 am, had to journal quickly. Doubt I'll be able to sleep but have to try.