DOSE:	3 mg	oral	Melatonin
	50 mg	oral	Vitamin B-6

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I have a quite long history with melatonin – I started taking it in 2003 as a sleeping aid and also to help with lucid dreaming. About 2 months ago I stopped taking it, due to running out of the supply. I also feel quite depressed (late Fall), so I didn’t bother buying more. Since then, my sleep schedule was highly irregular – going to sleep at around 2-3AM, waking up after 11AM-1PM.

Most of all, I was missing dreaming. My nights since stopping taking Melatonin were filled with groggy, hazy dreams that I barely remembered in the morning. I keep a dream journal, but lately barely had energy to write even a few words down.

Today I said enough, and got more melatonin in an attempt to reset my sleep pattern to more normal hours. However, I decided to do this in style and pulled every trick I knew to increase the vividness of my dreaming as well:
1) Going to sleep early (around 10 PM) to maximize time in darkness
2) Drinking water to force awakenings
3) Taking a combination of melatonin + vitamin B6 to boost vividness
4) Extending the time in bed to 10+ hours to eliminate anxiety

I took a 3mg Melatonin pill and a 50mg Vitamin B6 pill with a very large glass of water (around 500 ml). This took place at 10:30PM. I just sat on my bed in the darkness and contemplated philosophy in my bed until I felt really sleepy (around 20 minutes). I fell asleep in my clothes and felt very comfortable. The usual tossing and turning was not there.

Drinking a lot of water before bed causes me to wake up at least once through the night, and I did wake up at around 2AM. Quickly examining my experience, I realized that I woke up from an incredibly long, vivid and detailed dream. Putting it in writing here is doing disservice to the experience, so I’ll leave it out of this. The dream featured a good quantity of awareness.

After using the bathroom, I quickly wrote down the dream and fell back to sleep after drinking a bit more (half a cup – 100ml) water. At 3:30 I woke up again to use the bathroom, after an incredibly detailed dream in which I experienced conscious flying among other things. That was really fun!

Without letting the excitement or expectations overwhelm me, I repeated the procedure – wrote down the dream and drank another 100ml of water. And I woke up again after an intense dream in which I thought I time traveled 8 years ago. It was delightfully trippy and confusing.

I did not get out of bed for the rest of the night, but still managed to regain awareness after each dream episode and recorded several more dreams. I got out of the bed at 10:30 AM.


This night was remarkable – after weeks of nothing, I’m back into interesting, engaging and aware dreaming! Two qualities set these dreams far apart from the usual ones:
1) The intense, bizarre, yet comprehensible dream world with deep history and characters
2) The unusual level of awareness, able to analyze the experience, respond and interact with it in meaningful ways (not quite lucid dreaming, but the next thing closest to it)

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 88586
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Jun 1, 2011	Views: 22,528
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Melatonin (94), Vitamin B-6 (160), Dreams (85) : Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3), Alone (16)