Galantamine / Huperzine A experiments

So I've decided to go back to trying supplements to aid in re-kickstarting my LD practice. I took 4mg galantamine last night with 300mg of AlphaGPC at 4 hours, with the anticipation that I would hit my main dreaming period of about 5-6 hours when the AlphaGPC was hitting peak plasma. It was a small dose (I generally only take 4mg galantamine but usually more choline), and I didn't get lucid, but I did have vivid, memorable, fairly long dreams for the remainder of the night, with good recall that survived across several wakings. Most importantly, I *got back to sleep* in a reasonable time. I was worried at first since it looked like it was going to be another insomnia period at first, but it was early enough in the night, and I took my sleep-supporting Huberman cocktail (not full strength, but enough to help with returning to sleep), that plus relaxation got me back to sleep in probably 30 minutes.

I also have Huperzine-A, which I will try, perhaps after 3-4 days. I don't have choline bitartrate, but I prefer to take the galantamine earlier to give me more of a chance of getting back to sleep, and choline bitartrate has a relatively quick peak plasma time, so it makes less sense to take it. It may even assist in falling asleep on galantamine not to take choline bitartrate...interesting point!

Attempt #1: Took it 4-5h after sleep. Impossible to fall asleep. Feeling full of energy.

(Also possible excitement from the hype of reading too much good stuff about the success rate lol so yeah… will try again another time)

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Originally Posted by allismind

Attempt #1: Took it 4-5h after sleep. Impossible to fall asleep. Feeling full of energy.

(Also possible excitement from the hype of reading too much good stuff about the success rate lol so yeah… will try again another time)

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How much did you take? Did you take it with anything else? (Usually for best effect you need a short and a longer-term acting choline, e.g. shorter acting: choline bitartrate, e.g., longer: Alpha GPC
Did you stay up after taking it or try to go right back to sleep?

I need to take it and immediately aim directly for sleep. It may also really help to take a sleep-promoting stack at bedtime, like Magnesium L-threonate, L-theanine, Glycine, L-tryptophan, etc. But too much relaxation I find suppresses recall a bit, so it's a balance.

With time and experience, you'll fall asleep. Also, if you haven't, I recommend reading "Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements" to learn about dosing, combination, timing, avoiding building resistance, etc.

The short version: always start with minimal doses and single supplements, over time working up to larger doses (if needed) and combinations of supplements. The recommendation for galantamine is generally no more frequently than once every 4 days.

I took 6mg of Galantamine (choline and alpha gpc are coming soon). I cant take less cos the capsule is a powder one and it would be very messy to open it...
I dont think I wont take anything else because even this is just for curiosity. I dont like to rely on exterior stuff.

I went to sleep directly haha but I was way too energized. Its weird cos I havent really slept a lot.

I read that book before buying the products, but thank you <3
In fact thank you for all your time, efforts and everything you do here and on reddit.

The night after attempt #1.
I dont know if this is placebo or not but the night after my first attempt I took nothing. My sleep was very light. At some point I even felt myself sleeping and I was aware of my face and body which was weird haha. In a way very similar when you wake up after a lucid dream and dont move, you know that you "slept" just a second ago.
In fact I woke up after 2.30h of sleep and couldn't continue. I had to go out of bed and play some video games so I get sleepy again.
The second part of the night was normal and I had a creepy nightmarish dream which is less normal, in fact very rare for me.

@Fryingman I dont know if this thread is meant for all to share their experiences or its just for you. Maybe I should not post here? Tell me if I misunderstood lol

Please continue, the more the merrier!

galantamine does hang around in the body for a couple days they say, it has a long half-life, so there could be some effects on the day afterwards.

Attempt #2 I woke up after 4 hours of sleep and took the pill and went back to sleep.
I was waiting for it to "work" ... the whole day, I was reading books, forced myself to fall asleep to the point I had a headache. Even while doing shopping and having trip with my family I was questioning why this pill didn't work. During the whole time I was having talks with my family, taking great pictures of the incredible beautiful scenery, went to the restaurant. Everything was normal to me...

THEN I WOKE UP FROM THIS CRAZY HYPER REALISTIC DREAM lol

So yeah I guess just another crazy false awakening. I feel so naive lol

I almost never have false awakenings, and those rare times when I do, it's never in my real location, always a pure dream location, that I remember. I got FAs more often when in the middle of intense LD practice. So I hope to be generating them a lot more in the near future!

Was that really an attempt #2? Or was the attempt part of the dream? It is was attempt #2, it probably is too soon after #1. The rule for galantamine is once every 4 days at most....to avoid building resistance and maybe other issues.

I was following the instructions from the book. It says:

"Since Galantamine takes a full 48 hours to completely clear
out of your system, it should not be taken on two consecutive nights.
If dreams become movie like and/or bazaar consider taking a few
days off. Piracetam can be used directly following a lucid dream
attempt to counteract the effects of Galantamine and reduce
sensitivity to tolerance and/or desensitization."

Which I did. But yeah I dont plan on using it ever 2 days, its just "curiosity" start I guess :D

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

So I've decided to go back to trying supplements to aid in re-kickstarting my LD practice. I took 4mg galantamine last night with 300mg of AlphaGPC at 4 hours, with the anticipation that I would hit my main dreaming period of about 5-6 hours when the AlphaGPC was hitting peak plasma. It was a small dose (I generally only take 4mg galantamine but usually more choline), and I didn't get lucid, but I did have vivid, memorable, fairly long dreams for the remainder of the night, with good recall that survived across several wakings. Most importantly, I *got back to sleep* in a reasonable time. I was worried at first since it looked like it was going to be another insomnia period at first, but it was early enough in the night, and I took my sleep-supporting Huberman cocktail (not full strength, but enough to help with returning to sleep), that plus relaxation got me back to sleep in probably 30 minutes.

I also have Huperzine-A, which I will try, perhaps after 3-4 days. I don't have choline bitartrate, but I prefer to take the galantamine earlier to give me more of a chance of getting back to sleep, and choline bitartrate has a relatively quick peak plasma time, so it makes less sense to take it. It may even assist in falling asleep on galantamine not to take choline bitartrate...interesting point!

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Fryingman, it is nice to see you still going full speed. :nodyes: What is Huberman coctail?

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Originally Posted by Nfri

Fryingman, it is nice to see you still going full speed

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I'm trying, brah, I'm trying. It's a long, steep hill to climb, but I'm going to give it a couple years of solid effort and see what I can make of it.

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscience prof at Stanford who runs a YT podcast where he discusses many science-based life enhancing protocols, his video on sleep optimization is great, the "cocktail" I speak of is his sleep recommendation of 144mg Magnesium L-threonate, 200-400mg L-theanine, Apegenin [50mg? I'm not taking this yet, waiting for it to arrive], plus 3g Glycine, 500mg GABA [these two every other night], and I add 1 capsule sour cherry concentrate and 500mg L-tryptophan. Most nights this makes me very relaxed and I sleep well with it. More L-theanine (400mg) makes it harder to recall dreams I find, because I'm so relaxed, the sleep is deeper. I call his recommendations the "Huberman Cocktail." The YT video is here that summarizes all his sleep recommendations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2aW...Qc5e8Ir97RLuVW

Attempt #3: 2 short sexual lucid dreams and multiple half lucid and movie like dreams.

Attempt #2 -- long, vivid, stable, super high res, "more real than waking," epic LD.

:banana:

Wow. Wow wow wow. 4mg galantamine and 600mg Alpha GPC taken at the 3hrs waking....led to a WILD (in every sense of the world) lucid romp through FAs, more vivid than waking, ultra-stable, high-res, super-realistic, multi-scene, long LD (felt like an hour, definitely 30 minutes or more), and follow-on vivid non-lucids in later sleep cycles. This is the 2nd time I've tried it this year (the first being Nov 2, about 3 weeks ago).
After taking the supps, it took me somewhere around 30-60 minutes to fall asleep again. I spent the time relaxing body and mind with the idea of falling asleep unconsciously and having a DILD in subsequent sleep cycles. I took it early because of past issues with falling back asleep and I wanted to make sure I fell asleep again quickly after taking the supps. Instead, after that timeframe mentioned, I felt the familiar deepening feeling of sleep, and then WHAM! I was hit with a wave of vibrations the like of which I've never experienced before. I'm not unfamiliar with REM atonia sensations, I've felt vibrations many times before. But these were massive, strong, and accompanied by a sensation like my heart was stopping. I even sort of (maybe in a dream) half-raised up in bed to shake off the vibrations because they were so unpleasant. But I lay back down, they continued for a bit, then subsided, and I tried to imagine entering a scene. I detected slight movement in the visual field, and I tried to imagine a scene on a vehicle, and I shortly appeared in a bus or train moving past a moving landscape. It faded in a few seconds and I thought "wow that sucks, all that time and such a short dream", ... and then woke in a FA on a bus non-lucid, and the dream continued non-lucid for a while, then after failing to fly, I did a nose pinch state test, and got fully lucid, and began the lucid adventure!

WoW, good job! When did you go to bed and how long have you slept before wbtb and taking supplements?

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Originally Posted by Nfri

WoW, good job! When did you go to bed and how long have you slept before wbtb and taking supplements?

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Thanks! At the 3 hour waking (went to bed at 23:20 and took them at 02:20) and went (tried to) immediately back to sleep

I took galantamine for the first time a week or two ago. That was at bedtime, but I was having trouble sleeping so I ended up taking melatonin too. Still, I had one or two dreams that were unusually engaging - I would say vivid, but I often have vivid dreams, I think. But these were more emotionally engaging, one or two being nightmarish, which is unusual for me too. So I tried again last night during a WBTB. The following hours ended up being quite a trip. My recall is a bit fuzzy for some reason, but it seems like I was drifting in and out of lucidity and having dream adventures for quite a while. Anyway, I think it broke my lucid dry spell.

I wonder - if it takes 48 hours for galantamine to clear out of your system, does it matter if you take it at bedtime or during a WBTB?

I took a 4mg dose each time. I wonder if a smaller dose might be better - something about my experience reminds me of when I take too much vitamin b-6, with lots of dreams but kind of jumbled together. In that case, a half or 3/4 of the recommended dose works better than a full tablet.

While galantamine takes 48 hours to clear out, it's recommended not to take it more frequently than once every 4 days. Still, it's best taken at WBTB, because the peak plasma effects are pretty quick, within a window of a few hours. I've tried it at bedtime and it didn't seem to do much. Also, it's the peak plasma time of the choline sources that may also be the key, and those are in a pretty narrow window of a couple hours tops. One could supposedly take the galantamine at bedtime and cholines throughout the night, I've never tried that....maybe worth a try!

Attempt #3: long night of quite vivid dreams, lots of wakings, recall spotty, no lucids.

So I guess I've found out how early is too early for galantamine. I took 4mg G plus 600mg AlphaGPC at the first waking, somewhere around 1.5-2 hrs, approx 01:20am. I woke at about 03:30 after a large bunch of dreams with OK recall , quite vivid (very unusual for that early). I thought about taking more AlphaGPC but didn't. Sleep sporadic, a number of wakings, recall at pretty much every waking. Sick & noisy wife and general alertness prevented getting back to sleep after about 06:00.

Many scenes recalled , but they're all jumbled and fragment-y.

Attempt #3.5, sort of an experiment: on the night after attempt #3 I took 300mg AlphaGPC alone during a middle of the night waking. Recall was OK but no lucidity. So the notion of galantamine taking a while to clear out of the body, so maybe trying more choline on subsequent nights, doesn't really pan out it seems, at least from this experiment.

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Originally Posted by cedwards105

I wonder - if it takes 48 hours for galantamine to clear out of your system, does it matter if you take it at bedtime or during a WBTB?

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At the end of my first year of pretty intensive LD/DY training I began a galantamine program where I took 8 mg every Saturday night for a year or so. After a bit of experimenting I settled on taking it during WBTB at the beginning of my third dream cycle. At that time I had trained myself to wake at the end of each two hour REM cycle to journal.

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

......it's best taken at WBTB, because the peak plasma effects are pretty quick, within a window of a few hours

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Remember that the REM cycle gets progressively longer during the night so timing turns out to be very important coupled with the above observation with which I concur.

Regarding effects, remember that galantamine is, in effect, re-activating the cortical activity that has been naturally shut down during REM. While this gives us more "command and control" during the dream it also, in my experience, inhibits the natural flow of the dream. My experience was that this caused a bit of confusion at first as my enhanced conscious control of the dream clashed a bit with that natural flow.

As time went by I began to incorporate some very strong Buddhist-based breathing and concentration protocols during the WBTB periods as the galantamine was kicking in and this caused a very definite transformation of the entire dream experience to what I would describe as a naturally flowing dream lucidity, one that allows the dream to fully develop around me while I maintain a continuity of consciousness from the waking state. Now that I have achieved that I no longer need the galantamine boost to get there.

My approach might not be right for most classic LDers but it is just what I was looking for.