Got.....well it feels distinctly like a gift. Quite different from other dreams, as, after I'd decided to go to sleep for the day, I'd taken a sedative, wanting to get to sleep quickly, and combined with my antiseizure med (itself not used as such here, I'm on it though, but primarily used either for in-patient alcohol detox or for short term sedation/anxiolysis, the two together certainly put me to sleep pretty effectively)
This time, I'd added some valerian extract, which I find has some weird ass effects on dreaming, inducing an intense and continual dreaming state, and whilst being sedating, it seems to make the sleep slightly shallower in some way. It promotes lucid dreaming and dream recall, which is the primary reason, rather than any actual sedative contribution, that I use it. Ordinarily during dreaming, at least during the REM phase of sleep, both the cerebral cortex, responsible for information processing, and the hippocampus, which plays a critical role in memory consolidation, is also, but whilst active, there is a disconnect between the two which explains certainly partially, why our dream recall is for the most part, fragmentary.
Weird thing about valerian is that it seems to make a long sequence of dreams interconnect with each other. So one sometimes finds oneself, whilst in a lucid dream, back somewhere earlier. Someone or something within this one part, gave me some advice. To ask oneself 'have we been here before', during a dream, and concentrate on the idea in a meditative sort of way. I found that after following that course, I could indeed navigate out of past sequence-portions of dream and remain conscious of the fact I was dreaming. And I remember it clearly, hours and hours later. Weird sort of meta-meta dream. To get given advice by a figure within a dream, someone I haven't seen for years, about how to retain awareness in dreams about dreams, in a dream. Actually I'm not in the least sure how many layers of meta- that has. It was certainly peculiar. And it seems to have worked.
I'm going to keep this in mind, see if I can use the valerian as a learning aid at first, in becoming better at lucid dreaming, to train myself in 'technique' in a manner of speaking so as to more capably enter the lucid state without its aid. Along with some interesting things I've read in neuroscience journals, about memory consolidation, dreaming and brain region interconnectivity. Timing, I read the other day may be important in choosing when to dose valerian, if I'm to use it to best effect, in that immediately after memory consolidation there seems to be a neurological lag-phase where this is depressed, after first peaking for several days, then undergoing a sort of downtime, and oddly, some 5-6 days later, more activity related to the pre-lag consolidation phase. As if perhaps things are being filed away in short-term storage, before things are (lag time) tagged for subsequent thorough archival in longterm storage.
IMO there should at the very least be something interesting to learn from the use of both suitable plants or synthetic agents, things like melatonin, cholinesterase inhibitors [pharmaceutical versions of nerve agents, with usually reversible binding to cholinesterase enzymes, since acetylcholine is intimately involved in cognition, memory, amnesia and learning [the military organophosphate nerve agents are irreversible or quasi-irreversible AChE inactivators] there are medical alzheimer's drugs of this type, like galantamine which have also become popular amongst quite a few people for enhancing dream recall, although they do require care in their safe use. I've used it for (waking) memory support before with some success. And biorhythm techniques to help tease out the right times and places for best use of any such tools in lucid dream 'training'
The self-questioning thing, 'have we been here before' though, that is very new to me. Only got that potential little gem about 12 hours ago. Worked the first time, for many hours, dreamingly continuously. Wish I had an fMRI machine, and one that didn't make a constant banging noise and play like shit with metal in my body. radio-fluorodeoxyglucose imaging of comparison images whilst using various herbs, nootropics etc. and their effects on sleep architecture and dreaming.
