Heightened dream recall ability linked to increased creativity, connectivity
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psypost.org
Here's how to do it: as soon as you wake up, pay attention to whether you were just dreaming or not. Don't get out of bed and go to the bathroom -- if there was anything to remember from your dreams, you'll lose it by doing this. Dream memories are extremely fragile. What you need to do instead, if you remember anything at all (even just part of a dream, some fleeting image) is get out a piece of paper and write it down immediately, in as much detail as possible.
Once you make a habit of this, a curious thing happens. First, you'll remember more dreams. After a while, you likely won't have enough time in the morning to write them all down. The other thing that happens is you'll dream more vividly. There seems to be a link between how descriptive you are in your writing and how rich your dream experience becomes.
I've had very good luck with a slight variation of this, too -- especially at the start. Rather than immediately waking up and writing down your dream(s), I've found it very helpful to immediately close my eyes and continue to visualize the dreams as I go back over what happened in each. This lets you build up more concise (see: faster-to-write-down) outlines without as much "real world" visual input trying to break those fragile dream memories. This approach might be overkill for writing down a single dream, but IMO helps a lot when you're trying to remember and write down multiple/many dreams.
This article now makes me wonder whether I might be losing out on some benefits of dream recall. Curious to see what else researchers find about it.
I see it like this: You spend a third of your life asleep. By not "utilizing" your dreams, you effectively waste that time.
dream recall is very easy to learn and even easier if you actively write down your dreams. From there on, it's not much further to start looking into lucid dreams, where you can take control, even over nightmares.
Facing my nightmares in my teens (even without being lucid) was very liberating.
I guess I was way more optimistic and gullible, now I'm realistic and don't trust anyone, even myself :D
Also, the better you get at exercising this, the better chance you have at entering a lucid dream. Best chance for those is also right when you wake up, spend a couple minutes recounting a dream, and then fall back asleep.
It's basically substances or methods you can use in order to dream harder. Cholinergic (affecting choline, basically the opposite of anticholinergics which are horrible pesticides ruining everything), and other ways (Maracuya (passionfruit) leaves under the pillow with its distinct smell to remind you you're dreaming when you're asleep, WILD lucid dreaming, etc).
There's like communities around these, and they're the wildest things you'll ever experience. Ever since the dream where I jumped off a train that was taking me to a genocide centre, lived somehow despite this fact, and was stabbed by cosmic nazis by bayonets to death in painstaking detail I've never had anything resembling a nightmare ever since (like a recognizance things aren't happening for real and I can just wake up and laugh) and pretty much stopped that shit because it's super weird and even more underground than the illegal drug scene.
I met a guy in Colombia who was a professor who was studying indigenous people doing this kind of thing, hence the maracuya leaf method. It's like another world, where people deliberately dive into their dreams and come back with insights.
There's an extremely interesting paper to me published in Nature Neuroscience which is the best insight into dreaming I've ever seen, as how it's probably an adaptation for anticipation in a virtual reality kind of environment. When you consider when you see animals like your cat or dog twitch around when sleeping while lightly barking/meowing it makes total sense [1]
[1] https://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/scholarly-activitie...
Wow, that list is pretty huge. I don't remember trying anything on that list outside of Galanthus, which was pretty interesting.
It is less violent than writing. Requires less focus. Less damaging to the fragile memories.
Just mumble into the phone.
In the longterm, there is no longterm here. I am not a regular dream-journaler.
I am a regular vipassaner tho. Which is great for recall and vividness.
When waking up, close your eyes and try out a couple of different sleeping positions. Apparently you recall a dream much faster, if you get in the same position you were in while you dreamed it.
I've always had a natural ability to remember my dreams. And one of the most curious things about my dreams is that I can recall (as in right now) dreams I had decades ago. I can often remember them until late in the day. I can also know when I had a dream I already had years ago (it happens often). It's almost like a deja vu.
I never had a dream diary, but I would like to make one just to find these repetitions, connections, relations, etc.
It's also getting a lot easier to pinpoint the origins of dream contents into things I had been thinking about while awake, too. The connections just seem a lot more apparent.
I've wanted to write my dreams down but not sure how to do it without bothering my partner in the middle of the night.
What's really interesting is that these "dream movies" always have a half-decent plot. IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons. My dreams don't stick to these tropes and have actual twists, lessons, etc. Like if they were a real movie I might actually watch it.
For example one of them followed a rebellion against an oligarchy, but it never stuck to any main character. First we're introduced to someone, then eventually new people are introduced, and then eventually the original character dies but we just continue the story focusing on the new people, then even more people are added and they die and so on. So it's a bit more realistic and nobody gets plot armor.
Idk how creative I am, I usually identify as someone whose more left-brain.
I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream with a sound track just as I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream in black and white. But your brain is definitely influenced by cinema.
i remember my dreams in full details, like the stage, lightning, color, cast, interactions, dialogs, etc.
but mostly only small part of the whole story
music i often hear either when i fall into sleep or wake up, but also when i play it in the dream like a guitar
also i dream of pseudo-code
yeah, sometimes i wish there was a way to screen-capture my dream, because some of them would make amazing blockbusters (like some dystopian lost worlds)
A weird realization for me is all the events in the dream were produced by me. Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
Imagination and technical skill (that is, how well you use a piano or paint brush) are orthogonal domains. The way to tap into your imagination is to develop your technical skill to the level where you're capable of translating what you imagine to the physical motions necessary to convey it on canvas.
i too hear the best music in the world in my dreams
yet after i wake up i forget it instantly
the only thing i remember then is the fact that i heard it, just not exactly what
i wake up with a feeling that what i heard was the most wonderful music ever, yet in reality hardly remember it
It's a huge problem. I have watched very little American media produced in the last decade because of this. Whenever some coworker talks about how great this new show is, I'll watch it and cringe. It's 90% an A-plot B-plot following the same tired template. Then 10% of it is doing some form of virtue signaling, grievance agitation or other propaganda technique to rile the plebs. I can only imagine people who watch it are desperate for any sort of escape from reality.
Outside the US, at least other countries play with different storytelling techniques. France with their 85 plots in a single story and Korea with their strong single plot driven by the main character's emotion. Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
You can even see it in social media, you can make out the common tropes shaped by the society/culture/subculture/mainstream media and while original thoughts and non-us/them|black/white comments are there, they get downvoted. Which is pretty sad. All the while, everyone thinks they're right and better than everyone else.
Japan's entertainment is not that different imo, most of it uses the same tropes, maybe with a small difference (that they later forget about). But yeah, some actually original content shows up more often.
That's not really true, it's usually the most popular as it's a money issue. Pick randomly a few seasonals and you'll find that most of them are not that good.
Otherwise unknown artists can and often do make a name for themselves by telling a good story, and their story gets boosted by a functioning entertainment industry.
Contrast that to America's entertainment industry. A filthy and incestuous cabal of people decide what does and doesn't make it. Ideological zealotry required to step foot at the gates. Serial rapists as the gatekeepers using their power to take advantage of others.
I have that too, surprisingly complex plots. I suspect it's because of what we consume - movies, culture, politics, etc.
(Maybe I'd been watching a lot of movies or TV shows at the time, not very immersed, and some of that audience mode was just getting tickled by the GC cycle?)
for example if the setting is in school, my classmates would react to me as they would in real life
Thinking up an idea and remembering an idea probably have similar patterns on EEG. I guess that experiment has been done?
At times I've had pretty interesting dreams, but since I was a teen (decades ago) wondered if perhaps the dream was made on the spot as I "remembered" it. Provided the creative part kept ahead of the "recall" part then it seems doable.
I wonder if there could be negatives to greater dream recall, processing memories of dreams sounds like extra work for your finite brain functions to handle.
I once woke from a dream with a sense of religious injunction, and still have the name I was "given" as a curiosity in my life, "St Athanasius of Lubensk". I had never heard of the forename nor the place at the time of the dream. Research showed them to separately be something. If you have details, let me know.
That's a good question, especially since the "people who can frequently recall their dreams tend to be more creative". It might be a self-report effect.
Another thing that the article seems to skip is the fact that it's doesn't try to measure only recall, but also the actual presence of dreams (you can't recall if you don't dream). There's no way to tell the difference. Plus the usual limitations of such studies: the manipulation (short sleep for the measurements and sleep deprivation in the non-measurement period), and bad statistical practices (NHST, calling higher p values proof of absence).
Athanasius is greek for "immortal" and is a common name of saints, church fathers etc. Lubensk (Лубенськ) is an obscure city near Luhansk. Saint Athanasius of Lubensk refers to Athanasius III of Constantinople, saint of the Orthodox church known as an "enlightener", who died near Lubensk. According to the Wikipedia article[1] he sometimes appears to people in dream visions, so your experience is not entirely without precedent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_III_of_Constantinop...
Gotta say the "appears to people in a dream" is kinda fucked up [messing with my head].
It must be 10y or more since I last researched it, looks like there are more leads out there.
Thanks.
Finally Stephen LaBerge did a study where he was able to move his eyeballs in a distinct pattern during the REM phase [1], proving that he had conscious control while asleep.
This is easily disproved by observing that people sometimes mutter in their sleep as they dream. Cats/dogs vocalize and twitch while dreaming too sometimes.
However, the possibility that some people dream for real while others simply construct faux memories on the point of waking up seems very stretched to me personally.
If you're asking about specific individual experiences, I've personally experienced people talking in their sleep about something, then waking up and explaining what it was about, with perfect consistency. I've also experienced this myself (having other people witness me doing so).
i would venture an explanation, but i'm not sure if your comment was real or just something i thought of as i started typing into this box, and even if i did explain, i wouldn't trust you to understand my reply as something that you didn't imagine.
When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.
It's hard to describe exactly what was so unpleasant about it for me, but there's some element of time perception involved...it was as though my memories of dreams were encoded on the same track as my waking memories, and my days were missing the "pause between songs" so to speak.
Thankfully, at least for me, this is an effect that goes away quickly after I stop keeping a dream journal. I have had a similar effect when stressed/overworked, though, where I start dreaming in code. That's terrible.
After such a dream, when I wake up, I really feel like "damn, I should have found the best move and shown them!" but also like my brain is burned out from thinking so much and visualizing so much in my mind. Not restful.
But fortunately I have better dreams as well and sometimes, when I feel lonely, my brain turns on self-healing mode or something and I dream of someone I love. I will gladly take all the exhausting dreams, to keep the good ones.
Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
I especially like that I can identify a dream as the cause if I wake up in a weird mood. I worry that if I didn't have this recall, I might wake up just being vaguely pissed at my husband (because he was being a jerk in a dream).
Recently I tried the supplement cocktail[1] that neuroscience podcaster Andrew Huberman has mentioned he sometimes uses: magnesium threonate, epigenin, and L-theanine.
While this does indeed make it easier for me to fall asleep, I also noticed that it consistently produces weirder and more memorable dreams than I normally have.
While I doubt there is a causal relationship between remembering your dreams and the creativity benefits described in this article, I do prefer to have wild dreams and remember them. If that describes you, too, you might experiment with these supplements and see if they have a similar effect.
I think this is related to the phenomenon of walking into a room and forgetting why you came in.
Memories are connected to the rest of your perspective. Change perspective and switch memories.
Change perspective intensely enough and you could flip all of your memories. Even your identity.
Control part, for instance, was dreaming about being on vacation on some island which contained zombies and, although first trying to defend and hide from them, I thought ‘it is just a dream, let’s see what happens if I get bitten’ and so I had one of them bite me. I turned into a zombie and noticed I could still think and thought maybe the others can too. They could, so now my friends and me were immortal and ready to cure the world of everything. So nightmare turned into an excellent thing.
But yes, I trained lucid dreaming since I was about 17-18, which is 30 years ago. I can just either let a dream play out or change things or wake up. I can also often make dreams continue after I wake up.
Yes, that’s the exact problem I’m talking about. It’s not good. It feels like it’s bordering on delusion. I’ve met other people like this in RL. I know one woman who believes in things that only happened in her dreams. I don’t think that’s all that healthy. And of course, you’ve got an entire Reddit community devoted to these things.
This connection between dreaming and writing is of great interest to me. I am somewhat surprised that my most compelling writing was not inspired directly by any dream that I remember. The phenomenon of the one and the other are that similar. A kind of background hallucination can be intuited when writing fiction. In my experience, these hallucinations indicate that the writing has attained a degree of formal completion. I observe the characters of my story as though they were made of clay and also diminutive. Why clay? I am unsure, but I think it has to do with this clay’s yielding but inelastic quality.
Did they also score well on the Torrance tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thi... , based on Guildford but...
I read an article once where Robert Frost took a creativity test and scored extremely low (based on seeing images in Rorschach inkblots) and remarked afterwards that creativity was not about seeing the images but in training oneself to ignore the non-essential images (paraphrasing, have never been able to find this via google - supposedly this happened while Frost was Poet Laureate.)
Also the following points seem relevant:
1. ability to remember dreams is at least partially based on being woken up during them or shortly afterwards, this is why you can generally only remember the last dream you had.
2. A good nights sleep is often described as being central to high intelligence.
3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence? Which brings me back to the question of how accurate the tests are, given that there generally agreed on foundational problems with all IQ testing methods (that I'm familiar with)
finally then, if it is true, the thing to help creativity would be to remember your dreams: https://www.wikihow.com/Remember-Dreams
When asked "Which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?", psychologist Donald Hebb famously replied "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" [1]
I'm no psychologist, but I'd imagine you'd find the relation between creativity and intelligence in the same context is similarly orthoganal.
1. Meaney M. The nature of nurture: maternal effects and chromatin remodelling. In: Cacioppo JT, Berntson GG. (eds) Essays in social neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 1–14.
I never met anyone who can relate, so I guess that’s pretty uncommon.
And if one gets used to having deep sleep only under an effect of a substance, then withdrawal, as you said, could be worse.
Just immediately stand up and start thinking of your day, rather than last night. It's the opposite of dream journaling, so my guess is that'll do.
I haven't specifically tried to dream less but I've never tried to remember anything either. When I wake up, I immediately start thinking about my plans for the day and/or check HN/instagram (admittedly, a bad habit).
I guess I am what the article describes as a low dream recaller. I recall a dream definitely less then once a week on average - significantly so. For me it's more like a couple of times a year or maybe once a month at best. It basically only happens when my sleep is interrupted. It has always been like that even in phases of my life where I had enough sleep.
I wonder how common that is? In the study from the article 27 out of 55 participants were low dream recallers. I assume participants were selected for dream recall ability and these numbers tell us nothing how common low recall ability really is?
"The study included 55 healthy participants (ages 19–29) with normal sleep characteristics and body mass index. Twenty-eight participants were high dream recallers (able to recall about 6 dreams per week on average), while 27 participants were low dream recallers (recalling less than one dream per week on average)."
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553072/the-oracle-o...
- [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/316781.Exploring_the_Wor...
I'm sure I would've tried it in my 20s, when I was experimenting with everything e.g. once I did a mantra for 2 weeks non-stop.
I had Ann Faraday's The Dream Game, the only really good book on interpreting dreams I've seen. One of its techniques is to treat all the parts of a dream as characters, and talk with them, ask them questions, or put them in dialogue with each other.
I had a dream diary, where I'd write down every dream I remembered. After a while doing that, I'd remember them almost every night. But then I'd write them down, then wake up and realize I only dreamt writing them down. So I'd have to write them down again. I had to stop when every day I'd have to write them down 4 times! Write them down, wake up, realize I only dreamt it, write them down again, wake up, realize I'd only dreamt that, write them down yet again, wake up etc. Too much.
Also I tried sandplay, a kind of psychological therapy, which was absolutely amazing, and seems very similar to getting the parts of a dream talking. The therapist (or whatever they call themselves. Mine was a new-agey author/guru type, but there was nothing new agey about what he said in the sandplay room) has a room with a sandbox in the middle, and shelves full of hundreds of objects, toys, figurines, etc of all kinds around the walls. You walk around the room, selecting whatever object you feel drawn to, and put it in the sand. With as little thinking about it as possible. Then when you feel like stopping, stop. (I kept putting more things in, dozens, until he asked me to stop, and regrettably we only got to talk about a few of them.) Then they ask you to talk about each thing in the sand, what they mean, what one is doing next to another one etc. The answers just pour out, and it's like being able to see inside your head. I found it absolutely incredible, highly recommend! It's fun, painless, you can do it any time... and suddenly the insights/revelations usually locked away and only accessible from dreams/hallucinogens/psychological work, are freely available, gushing out.
Nevertheless, taking advantage of the increased visibility into one's dreams for the sake of analysis is at least fun.
Curiously there are some ways to manage dreams, here's an interesting article on researchers investigating what's apparently a form of lucid dreaming, very Inception-like work:
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-entered-p...
Interestingly I find those long Youtube 'relaxing sleep' videos to be a good way to moderate dreaming, possibly via a similar mechanism. Maybe white noise has a similar effect. One I use has waves quietly crashing on the beach, although once it resulted in a dream of walking through a thunderstorm in a forest and I'm pretty sure every time the waves crashed I'd experience a lightning-and-thunder strike which was rather alarming, complete with vivid imagery, and eventually woke me up. However, using the same video over and over again seems to result in a constant point of reference when dreaming, leading to more peaceful and less intensely random dreams. (Right after the Ukraine war broke out I started having vivid nuclear annihilation dreams, which were a bit much, and using these Youtube videos mitigated most of that)
For those who struggle with sleeping through really intense dreams, strong indica cannabis will suppress dreams for many people, but the side effects are a lot of grogginess the next morning. Maybe for PTSD it's worth the tradeoff, but for many the cost-benefit ratio will be too negative.
For better or worse, there can also be a strong rebound effect with extremely vivid dreams when you stop smoking regularly.
I also don't remember my dreams at all. This is the way it's supposed to be for us.
If you remember your dream it means you were woken up in the middle of it. Something is disrupting your sleep whether it's the brain itself or something else. The waking up in the middle of the night thing could be sleep apnea.
For people like us we're not suppose to remember dreams. But if we do, it means our sleep was disrupted.
REM is not the definition of dreaming.
But when I do remember, it generally means it wasn't a good sleep
I have tons of vivid dreams that I can usually remember. I am fairly creative, although many would probably us the adjectives 'weird' or 'smart-ass'.
For resources I recommend Andrew Holocek’s books (amazing, drawing upon Tibetan Buddhist techniques) plus the app I made for lucid dreaming shapedream.co (I’ll happily give anyone free access to its tools and guides - just write me).
The app looks wonderful! It might be the perfect excuse for me to get back into it. I’d love to maybe discuss some of your recommended reads—I’ll drop you a note.
I dropped regular lucid dreaming once I gained this ability and focused on improving “dreaming” at will.
Interestingly, I haven’t had any lucid dreaming since starting antipsychotic medication. Hasn’t affected entering states at will. If anything, it’s made it easier because I have much clearer cognition and the difference reality and imagination is more well-defined.
The body and mind is fascinating. :)
I also have Closed Eye Hallucinations, which means that at night mostly when I close my eyes the light patterns turn into physical images. For a long time they were tortured faces but I see lots of things; trees, mountains, people... So my psychiatrist thoughts on this was that the brain creativity creates these images out of patterns from the light and dark when you close your eyes.
I wrote a very crappy web app for this back in 2012: http://keepdream.me/. It emails me every morning to ask what I dreamed and records my reply. There must be better alternatives now.
Have others noticed this?
The thing is, for like an hour or two, I was able to remember hours and hours and hours of dreams. All appeared in front of me. I could get them like a chain, first one, then another that happened in the same location (be it real or imagined), and another, and another... It was a pretty awesome, if a bit overwhelming experience.
The great thing is that now I know all the dream memories are still in there. I'm not able to remember them normally, but they are there.
Sadly, as I said, I have no idea of what I took.
Lots of nightmare-like dreams. Looks, sounds, smells like a nightmare, but doesn't "feel" like one). Thankfully I have developed/ adapted a way to wake-up whenever.
I'd say I am semi-lucid in most of my dreams. I also have a very distinct "dreamscape" where my dreams happen. I can remember many of my dreams from years ago pretty accurately even though I don't journal them.
But sometimes it doesn't work entirely as I end up waking up in another dream, which is sometimes freaky, as it's not evident to me at first that I'm in just another dream or if I am awake. But once I figure I'm still dreaming, I can always cause that train to appear again.
I keep running from this creature. It wants to talk to me but somehow I sense malice and that I should avoid talking to it at all costs.
from rats with electrodes to brain imaging tech
And those memories are like “aah I was falling” or “I hadn’t prepared for a test!” or “there was a group of people” sometimes the additional detail of “I wasn’t clothed…”
Hope my jalopy of a brain can make it through.
I've always suspected that these dreams are somehow linked to coding and the spatial/navigational sensations I get when constructing some idea in code.
I went from rarely remembering my dreams to recalling 5-6 dreams per night, and regularly lucid dreaming. While I shy away from any distinct interpretive framework (e.g. Freudianism) taking the time to ask "where did this come from?" or "what is this telling me?" has given me huge insights into my own hidden fears, anxieties, and desires.
I can honestly say I'm a much happier, more well-adjusted person as a result.
Is having more vivid dreams (and being able to recall them) a sign of a restful, good quality sleep, or is it the opposite?
To his credit, he did study the scientific literature on the subject in details and might have been tipped by some preliminary research on the subject.
I might say that, in vipassana, we extend our conscousness into places that are otherwise unconscious. And become comfortable being conscious there and having that place be part of our reality.
The land of dreams being one such otherwise unconscious place.
I've found a couple of 000 capsules filled with lecithin 30mins before bed is best.
A none supplemental alternative is water fasting but thats something that cant be done all the time.
Choline please a role in the Transulfuration pathway, as does B6 By stimulating the CBS enzyme.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fels-jbs-p...
I don't change anything in my life that I can think of in those periods which might be affecting my creativity, sleep quality, thinking etc.
Would love to know the reason though.
"Logical fact".
I missed this bit in your argument. Presumably, you assert that the mind's modalities consist of a 'rational' state of consciousness and a dream state mode where the content matter is "random". It is true that the mind, unfettered by the necessity to navigate in real-time a physical reality, is no longer constrained by either physics or causality. This then results in content matter that can seem random (as narratives) but to deprive them of meaning does not follow.
I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required.
Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one
place did a correction later seem necessary.
— Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev
The bible is trying to communicate, but it is not a factual piece.
That does not map to my experiences with dreams and their content. But then, I -- my conscious self -- do not take an adversarial position regarding my inner Self. I benefit from reflecting on my dreams, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time. Integrating unconscious psychological content of my mind has always been a positive event, and promotes psychological health, stability, maturity, and (believe it or not) insights.
YMMV.
So my claim is all the benefits are created by your conscious self, but you perceive it to be from the dream. Similar to how religion helps people. Both are fiction.
The burden of proof is always on the person assigning meaning to something. Why? because from a probability standpoint, no meaning is more likely. So the person claiming dreams have meaning must prove why their claim is real despite the low probability.
Why is meaning low probability? Because much more things in the universe have no meaning then have meaning.
For example, greek mythology. I know nothing of it. Yet I can make the claim that it is false and have a higher probability of being right then the person who claims greek mythology is real and has meaning and knows everything about it.
The majority of "meaning" is "found" the same way a christian "finds" meaning in the bible. It is common human behavior. By making a claim that someone has found meaning in some random thing this way, I am making a high probability claim because of the fact the behavior is so common.
Is there any links to The Brain Network and neurogenesis?
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/adult-n...
It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
I notice this with zinc/magnesium/calcium. Having taken it every night since adolescence, it's pretty much a requirement for good sleep. Without, REM city. Granted, less calcium and more magnesium these days.
>It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
Agreed. There's probably a good argument to be had that developing a supplement dependence for sleep has likely affected the course of my life, for better or worse. Probably worse, but who knows.
As an aside, be careful with B6 supplementation; it can accumulate, causing adverse CNS effects.