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Comment by replete | Hacker News Reader

I found another method: after waking up in the morning (with time to doze off again), nicotine pouch under the gum just after the heavy breathing starts. Super vivid lucid dreams, with obvious gotchas of using nicotine

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That sounds like a stupid way to suffocate and die on something in your sleep but it does affect a neurochemical (acetylcholine) which are implicated in how dreams and the entire sleep/wake cycle work. There's safer alternatives in my mind, 'oneirogics' [1] as I remember them being called, which affect the same neurotransmitters with none of the horrible addiction or choking risk - can be as simple as some ancient shamanic technique one researcher in central america told me, which was a maracuya leaf placed in your pillow to remind you in your dream of the distinct smell from the waking world that you're dreaming so you may control it

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneirogen

AFAIK galantamine is the only drug with actual studies[0] for inducing lucidity. Participants would practice dream recall and reality checks each day, and fall asleep after reciting lucid dream affirmations. Then be awoken in the middle of the night to take galantamine, and fall back asleep while visualizing a continuation of the dream they were in last.

Anecdotally, I become lucid whenever I take it without doing the rest of the study's rituals, but I've worked on improving my dream recall for years now.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30089135/

Yeah, I used to be really into knowing a ton about this stuff because it was something I kept on having out of my control before - I used to have worsening sleep paralysis when I was young and into my 20s, and lucid dreaming would be sort of a side effect of it... I guess this is what that WILD (wake-induced lucid dreaming) thing tries to actually induce, like from what I was reading you sort of meditate your way into that state and flip your consicousness into a lucid dream. Honestly my sleep was crazy back then and I talked to a doctor who said it was grounds for going for a sleep study and getting tested to see if I had narcolepsy, but I just ended up moving way closer to the equator instead and something about the seasonality of the sun coming up and down at the same time all year round is what a doctor there said could have reset my circadian rhythm as it got more pronounced in dark winter time.

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