Insights on Consciousness from Galantamine-Induced Lucid Dreams

I recently read about a study about using the dietary supplement galantamine to induce lucid dreaming. So far it appears to be the best method of lucid dream induction out there, with 57% of study participants achieving a lucid dream by following the study’s protocol.

I tried it myself and found that it worked extremely well. Not only did it induce a lucid dream, but it gave me an entire night of particularly vivid, complex, and multisensory dreams. I followed the protocol of waking up halfway through the night to take it; this way it’s maximally active when I’m actually dreaming.

Unlike other lucid dreams I’ve had in the past, this one did not let me directly control the imagery. However, it did give me substantially more mental horsepower and self-awareness for understanding my dream world than past lucid dreams. I eventually figured out that while I didn’t have direct control, I was able to nudge changes in the dream environment that gradually moved it towards things of interest.

To give a sense of the content complexity of the dream and what I mean by control: I was in the town square of a small town in northern Italy. I remember the bumpy feel of the cobblestones as I walked on them as well as the warm glow of the sun on my face. I walked up to a copper placard on the side of a church and read about the town’s history. I don’t recall all the details anymore, but I do recall being amazed at how sophisticated the description was given the fact that a part of my brain that was not accessible to my conscious self was generating all the text. It was very clear and easy to read. I decided that it would be fun to experience flying in this particularly lucid state, but when I tried to bring that into dream-reality I got the sort of vague imagery that my awake self generally gets while imagining things. Instead I realized that I’d have to seed whatever subconscious process was generating the world. I noticed that there were mountains in the distance, and decided that there would of course be a train that would take me there. Once I got there, I’d fly off the mountain. I then spent the next several minutes walking to the train station, reading the train schedule and map, and then taking the train up the mountain (with a timed transfer in the middle from the purple line to the red line). Once I was on top, I unrolled a paraglider that I had mysteriously acquired, did equipment checks, and took off into the sky.

Reading more about galantamine:

Galantamine is known for improving learning and retention of memories. In fact its primary use is in treating dementia. It’s not surprising at all that it would improve dream recall; in fact the vividness of the dreams may be due to the increased cognitive processing that is correlated with better memory-making. One common technique for improving your memory is to imagine the thing you want to remember as vividly as possible.

Galantamine increases the length of REM sleep episodes. This allows for longer and more complex dreams. The brainwave state of REM sleep tends to be primarily composed of high-frequency waves (as opposed to deep sleep, which is dominated by low-frequency theta and delta waves). Presumably this means galantamine increases high-frequency brainwaves, but the literature on this is limited, unclear, and contradictory.

Some speculation:

New explicit memory formation is highest when you’re focused and concentrating. Dreaming is basically the opposite; in a dream, the conscious mind never quite coheres, and thus memories of dreams are usually a vague and faint assemblage of scattered subconscious processes.

The standard dream state is probably calibrated to provide just the right amount of high frequency brainwave activity — enough such that more complex mental functions are available for the functions of dreaming (which appear to involve consolidating experiences from the previous day into long-term memory), but not enough to trigger full consciousness, which is unnecessary to this process.

Galantamine disrupts that balance, leading to increased high frequency brainwaves. This state leads to deeper processing as well as greater control of the scattered and mostly subconscious thoughts of the dream world, leading to a more coherent dream narrative.

There’s an experience called hypnagogia that generally happens in the few minutes before sleep; it’s characterized by high theta brain wave activity, which is associated with hypnosis and deep trance states. In a hypnagogic state, even people with limited visual imagination ability have the ability to create rich visual imagery in their mind. My normal lucid dreams (of which I get about 2 a year) are similar to hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is fragile and similar to deep meditation — too much conscious attention or excitement or agency can disrupt it, probably because it requires a theta-dominant brainwave pattern. It’s likely the galantamine-induced dreams did not allow direct visual control of imagery because there was too much consciousness present, and that prevented the theta-dominant brainwave pattern that we usually see in hypnagogia.

Thus, if I were to rank levels of consciousness by degree of conscious focus, it would look like this:

Fully awake
Galantamine-induced dreaming
Hypnagogia (awake, but barely)
Regular lucid dreaming
Regular dreaming
Deep sleep

In conclusion, this experience feels like further evidence that consciousness is just a high level goal-setting and narrative-making framework imposed on very complex subconscious processes. Consciousness is like a CEO approving an already-generated high level plan for a company and then taking credit for all the ideas and work the team generated along the way. Apparently a large fraction of what we think of as “executive function” (eg decision making, logical reasoning) actually happens non-consciously, which is what allows for complex objects and other humans with their own goals and motivations to be generated subconsciously in a dream environment. The conscious mind is often the last to know things, but it literally has all the ego required to concoct a reasonable explanation for the opinions it has and the actions it’s taking.