Well, last night's attempt was a total disappointment. Nothing happened at all and I have a couple of theories which I'll talk about in a minute.
Before that, I'd like to refer to my previous effort which I shared with my wife, particularly the effects she felt during the rest of the day which were very different to mine. Every time I've taken galantamine I've felt much 'sharper' than usual during the rest of the day and I've put that down to the fact that I'm 60 and possibly my level of ACh is quite low. It was interesting to note then that my wife, who's just two years younger, didn't seem to have the same response. She felt very tired physically which was probably due to her disturbed sleep pattern but although she didn't feel any less sharp, she certainly didn't feel any sharper. Thinking about it a little more I've narrowed it down to two possibilities - first, I naturally have a much lower than normal level of ACh, hence my very poor dream recall or its something to do with the longterm effects of taking of 'smart drugs' which I've done for a few years, on and off. They've ranged from Deprenyl to Nootropil, the latter which I've taken for the last year or so in a fairly casual way. Now, as some of you may know, Nootropil is Piracetam which Thomas takes after his galantamine induced dream session and is known for assisting choline uptake and has been shown to increase the development of Ach receptors in the frontal cortex. The theory behind taking Piracetam as a 'smart drug' is that as you get older your Ach receptors tend to die off, so piracetam, which helps their formation, can combat the decline. And as we all know, ACh (acetylcholine) is important for memory formation and is associated with 'attention' or as I call it, 'sharpness'.
So, now as I'm writing this, I'm wondering why Thomas would advocate taking piracetam to ameliorate the effects of galantamine when it appears that piracetam actually encourages choline uptake and, if anything, would tend to increase its effects. Well, the theory is that piracetam actually helps to protect against desensitisation of the ACh receptors, so you don't build a tolerance to galantamine. I can follow that but I'm wondering if my longterm taking of piracetam, although very casual and not at a high level, has had some build up effect on my general ability to dream well. And how come my first couple of attempts with gaantamine were so encouraging, and this one was a complete washout ? Well, I have a theory for that.
First though a description of what I did. I went to bed at an early 10:15pm and immediately fell into a deep sleep. I awoke at 02:20 when my alarm went off and I took my galantamine+Alpha GPC pill, then got up and fed the cats in the kitchen. I then checked my emails and browsed the internet for a short while, locked the cats in the kitchen and returned to bed, looking forward to a few good LDs. However, and here is the key to my failure I think, lurking in the back of my mind was the dim recall that two of my previous LDs had some malevolent feelings associated with them and I can remember thinking, albeit briefly, that I didn't really want a reoccurance of anything like that again. I then attempted to induce a WILD but I probably feel asleep about an hour after I originally was woken up by my alarm.
They key to my failure, I believe, was my attitude. And the key to my previous success, I believe, was my attitude. After I'd read Thomas' book I was really excited and positive and once the pills arrived I just knew I was going to have an exciting night with some LDs. And that's just what happened. And on the second attempt. Then on the third attempt, whilst I did have some LDs, two had feelings of anxiety attached to them which I didn't like. Since then its been downhill. I was originally trained as a psychologist and know full well how important your mental approach is to your success or failure in the things you do and I believe my last two 'failures' are because my mental approach hasn't quite been 100%. I may well be wrong but I'm going to give it a couple of days before I make another attempt and will work on my mental attitude in the meanwhile. I'm also going to wait until all the personal elements of the previous day have been really positive and I'm in a positive frame of mind generally.
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