Tallier Reed (a pseudonym) had been taking the anti-depressant bupropion (generic Wellbutrin) for many years to manage his depression. While the treatment was largely successful, it was not without side effects.
One of those side effects, Reed suspected, was that the higher the dose of bupropion, the fewer dreams he remembered upon waking in the morning.
Setting up the Tallies
Reed first created a Bupropion tally, which he set up to prompt him for a numeric value (milligrams) with each new count.
He also set up a basic tally which he added to whenever he remembered a dream.
Halfway through his tracking period, Reed lowered his dose of bupropion from 300mg to 150mg.
Results
Reed tracked bupropion and dreams for the better part of a year. Since TallyLab allows you to add notes to any count, Reed also used the voice-to-text feature on his phone to record the content of each of his dreams — in effect keeping a dream journal. That way, he could later analyze not just how often he remembered his dreams, but also how much detail he remembered each time (via the word count of the note).
For the first half of the tracking period, when he was taking a 300mg dose of bupropion, he averaged 2.3 dreams a week with 55.74 words recounted per dream:
For the second half of the tracking period, when Reed was taking a 150mg dose of bupropion, he averaged 1.7 dreams a week with 38.74 words recounted per dream:
Given that halving his dose of bupropion reduced Reed’s number of remembered dreams by about 25% and his remembered dream word count by about 30%, it’s quite possible that the opposite of Reed’s hypothesis is true: More bupropion seems to correlate with more dreams rather than fewer.
Bonus Intel
By default, TallyLab shows a word cloud on the Stats view of any tally that has more than a couple of notes. Reed was therefore able to get a thematic overview of his dream life:
We can’t draw any conclusions here, but we are intrigued by the idea of a “weird party mall”.
This is a cross-post from the TallyLab Blog.
