Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming: A double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study


Together our results show that galantamine substantially and significantly increases the frequency of lucid dreaming. The double blind and placebo-controlled design of this study provides strong evidence that cholinergic enhancement with galantamine causally increases the frequency of lucid dreams in a dose-related manner.

Increased incidence of lucid dreaming was observed for both 4 mg (27%) and 8 mg (42%) doses compared to 14% for the active placebo, with an increased incidence of lucid dreams in the 8 mg dose compared to 4 mg dose.

In addition to assessing galantamine’s influence on lucid dreams, our study tested an integrated protocol for inducing lucid dreams, which combined some of the most effective existing methods of lucid dream induction reported in previous studies (including sleep interruption [18, 32] and the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams (MILD) technique [7]) together with cholinergic enhancement.

This combined protocol resulted in a total of 69 out of 121 participants (57%) successfully having a lucid dream on at least one out of two nights on an active dose of galantamine. This protocol is one of the most effective methods for inducing lucid dreams known to-date, and holds promise for making lucid dreaming available to a wider population.
Participants (N = 121) with high dream recall and an interest in lucid dreaming were randomly assigned counterbalanced orders of 3 doses of galantamine (0, 4 and 8 mg). On 3 consecutive nights, they awoke approximately 4.5 hours after lights out, recalled a dream, ingested the capsules and stayed out of bed for at least 30 minutes. Participants then returned to bed and practiced the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams technique while returning to sleep. The percentage of participants who reported a lucid dream was significantly increased for both 4 mg (27%, odds ratio = 2.29) and 8 mg doses (42%, odds ratio = 4.46) compared to the active placebo procedure (14%). Galantamine also significantly increased dream recall, sensory vividness and complexity (p<0.05). Dream recall, cognitive clarity, control, positive emotion, vividness and self-reflection were increased during lucid compared to non-lucid dreams (p<0.0001). These results show that galantamine increases the frequency of lucid dreams in a dose-related manner.