Galantamine keeps me awake

I've tried galantamine (with choline) around 6-7 times now. 4-6 mg. I take it after WBTB (4-5 hours). But it just keeps me awake. I really have a hard time falling asleep, and when I do a awaken several times. I've had a few lucid dreams after taking it, but my sleep is very light and I wake up very soon. Sometimes it feels as I've fallen asleep and woken up a hundred times.

I've tried combining it with 200-400 mg L-theanine to counteract the "awake effect" af galantamine, but it does not help. Maybe galantamine is not for me.

Any suggestions. Maybe I should try huperzine A. Anyone who has tried it?

what dose are you taking ?

4-6 mg

ok thats an average dose. i find it takes around 40-50 minutes to work and so i try to stay awake about that length of time and that has become normal. Staying awake can be the hard part now.

Do you wind yourself up while waiting for it to work, overthink the situation?, I do nothing now just wait until I get some feeling in a part of my body. Normally just a tingle or shiver and then I roll onto my side and within a couple of minutes I am OBE and walking across the room in a fully formed up dream

No, I don't feel that I'm overthinking the situation (maybe the first time). I just relax, and after a while I feel some sensations in my body and head. And over the course of 3-4 hours (after taking it) I feel that I've been much more awake than sleeping. I sleep around 4 hours before taking it, and I normally need to sleep a lot more.

Last time I got lucid I woke up immediately (after half a second). I did not even have time to get excited before I woke up. I think it happened because I slept too lightly.

Ok, there is the slimmest change that you are in some way lucid and lying there without understanding that it happened. I have had this a few times over the years. When you get those sensations you are pretty much there or an instant away and in an ultrafast transition you can move to a lucid state and not know this. Forgive me if this sounds silly but do a reality check or imagine your dream body floating out as these sensations arrive. I had one incident a few years back where I was in bed and waiting for the G to work. I was patiently waiting and then just rolled out of bed and hit the floor. I felt really stupid and then just thought about it for a bit and worked out that I was lucid and had rolled out of my body. I truly had no idea and I am not new to this.

Just a thought and happy to keep working on this with you if you want

I would say that it keeps me awake, too, except I think it is more likely that attempting to LD made me susceptible to insomnia, which I started experiencing, then which the Galantamine did not help. It has only actually worked once for me, and only minimally. That is only once out of 4 or 5 attempts. One time kept me awake and the others I slept through with nothing strange to report. The last time was like this, even though I duplicated events prior to be, including getting up, then listening to a hypnosis video.

While I don't lucid dream properly, what I find is that I have dreams that seem more vivid in some way, which I believe after the fact I should have realized were dreams, or opportunities to have this realization, but failed, so did not become lucid. The dreams typically involve me trying to fall asleep, or worrying that I have not slept, and at some point in the dream I find a very cozy "eureka" position in which I feel myself falling asleep (in the dream).

The Galantamine gave me one brief episode of sleep paralysis, following a brief dream about being awake, I strained to look in a mirror placed too high, and the reflection looking back at me was very bizarre: not my face, but a deformed monstrosity. It had unusual clarity to it, almost like it was watching a 3-D movie. Not that these movies are clearer than life, but that elements at different focal points seem unnaturally all in focus. Anyway, this face staring at me, though not scary, was accompanied by an "auditory hallucination" that sounded like a strange low steady growl, but it sounded strained like a groan or gurgle. Something in that moment struck me in panic and I suddenly felt not just the urge to awaken, but found myself trying to waken, not by moving, but by "thinking" myself awake. The intention was met with resistance and I felt myself trapped or stuck in this state. Since I was not attempting to flail my limbs, actual paralysis was not detected, but I did have this feeling of helpless dread of being stuck like that, being slowly dragged or held back in some state of doomed oblivion, accompanied by an inability to gasp for a breath I was desperately trying to take while struggling to snap out of it.

I wish I had not panicked, but realized what was happening and let go of struggling. However, after only a few mere seconds of this I DID snap out of it and sat halfway up with an audible gasp. Woah - that hadn't happened to me in years. Not as scary or severe as when I had SP as a child, but several times more intense than a typical hypinc jerk. It was the delay of a few seconds where the fear and dread persisted that made it more than just that split second sense of falling one feels prior to twitching a leg and jolting awake.

So, there is my testimony. I am eager to follow up the experience, and I foolishly tried it again the next night. No luck. So I gave it two nights. Same. You really have to wait several days before trying again.

I get close to 100% with G, the few times I miss I simply go to sleep first. It takes me around 40 or so minutes and I have tried to take it while I am awake but decided I need the time relaxing to get there. Its not the same with coffee as I can take that an hour or two before hand and it will work most of the time. Coffee produces a different type of HI.

Just keep at it, use it once a week and use it with Choline as well. One gets you lucid and one keeps you there The key with sups is that if you do nothing they might work but if you sweat it you will get past the window of opportunity .

As i said i dont do anything special just take them, wait till around 30 35 minutes, wait for the tingle somewhere and then onto my side and in a few moments I am just there.

It has been a few years of defining that instant and I have as much success on coffee of without anything so have not taken G for a month of two now. Still getting 3 -5 lucids a week and around 30 minutes or more each one so its just practice

Peter wrote: Ok, there is the slimmest change that you are in some way lucid and lying there without understanding that it happened. I have had this a few times over the years. When you get those sensations you are pretty much there or an instant away and in an ultrafast transition you can move to a lucid state and not know this. Forgive me if this sounds silly but do a reality check or imagine your dream body floating out as these sensations arrive. I had one incident a few years back where I was in bed and waiting for the G to work. I was patiently waiting and then just rolled out of bed and hit the floor. I felt really stupid and then just thought about it for a bit and worked out that I was lucid and had rolled out of my body. I truly had no idea and I am not new to this.

Just a thought and happy to keep working on this with you if you want

There is absolutely a chance that I've been lying lucid in my bed not realizing it. Actually it happened at least once and I realized it after a reality check. I try to do frequently reality checks, but of course it's easy to forget when you're actually lucid. Thanks for your advices by the way!

All good and keep asking away or reporting progress.

Instead of a reality check just imagine getting up and walking away. Most of the time you if lucid you will just get up and walk into a dream

Another lousy night. Started out okay. I set my alarm for a wakening at 2:30. I had a banana and warm milk. Felt sleepy. I went to bed at 11:30, listening to some binaural theta audio for a while. I just got bored with it, not falling asleep, so I turned it off. I actually did ALMOST fall asleep until a hypinc/myconic jerk woke me up! But as soon as I gave up on the audio, or trying to sleep on my back, I fell asleep, recalling no dreams.

Until I look at the clock and it is just past 4:00!! What happened to the alarm? Did I forget to actually turn it on once I set it, or did I turn it off in my sleep and forget about it?

No matter, I got up for a few minutes, check pipes weren't frozen, go to bathroom, but laptop and headphones away, and took one Galantamine. (What the heck ARE you supposed to do for those 30 minutes when you wake up to interrupt your sleep? I am not motivated to do anything BUT sleep, and TV and computer has light which just wakes you up more.)

AND PROMPTLY STAYED AWAKE FOR THE NEXT FIVE HOURS!!

What sucks more is I did not get called in to work, so it should have been a classic "cozy sleep-in day" that I used to do so well. This was very disappointing.

So, was it the pill, or my anticipation of what it might do (and seemed to have done a week ago)? I wasn't even THINKING about my predicament half the time. I even spent a while recalling friends from high school I had not seen since, remembering their smiling faces as they were then. Perfect opportunities to drift off, but it never happened.

I just don't understand how any of you can do this with any regularity, pill or no pill. I read some articles on this site saying you "shouldn't give up after just a few failed attempts" but it neglects to mention what happens if the cost of sticking at it results in weeks of on-off insomnia. It is one thing to give up out of boredom from no results, but another because it is making life stressful.

I'm also baffled by my hypinc jerk - I rarely get them anymore an the theory is that they result when you fall asleep TOO FAST before your body has time to shut down. TOO FAST?!? It happened after 5 or 10 minutes! Somewhere on this site is an article where the author boasts he or she can fall asleep in one second AND SO CAN WE. (No pressure there, right?) So on one hand I have "automatic" hypinc jerks waking me up when I AM falling asleep, but too quickly, and on the other will stay awake 5 hours straight.

Just makes me want to reset. Forget the whole damn LD project, holding my nose like an idiot during the day to train myself to dream of "reality checks," hoping for at least SP which MIGHT segue into LD. Stop laying on back or trying to meditate - the advice is to THINK about LD a lot, right, but obviously this is obsessing me too much and keeping me awake. So I don't know to "think of it" WITHOUT thinking about it. And the Galantamine, just hide it away or trash it. Never tried the idiotic advice of swigging down an espresso in the middle of the night. I'm sure that's just what my insomnia needed at that point...

ANYWAY, so you are not alone. It might not be the Galantamine, or it alone, but the expectation I/you/we have that is keeping us awake. And until one of the expert/veteran/genius Lucid Dreamers can give advice on how to achieve LDs without having to battle with insomnia or see us come and go as people who just didn't/couldn't stick at it, lacking discipline, then I suppose this is not for us.

Best bet is to (somehow) get back to the regular, lovely (albeit, non LD) sleep I've been blessed with most of my life, including the past several years before I started attempting this LD stuff again in earnest.

I just hope, for my sanity, that I can manage normal sleep once more with more success than I've tried to LD.