Dreaming Life » Vitamin B6

Can B6 Keep Me Awake At Night?

Ben — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:55:34 +0000

Attention! Every Tuesday, I’ll be answering questions from readers about dreams or anything else we talk about here on Dreaming Life! And guess what? I’d love to hear from you, too! Send your questions using the contact form here. Thanks!

People interested in their dreams have long noted the fascinating relationship between Vitamin B6 and dreams.

My own interest in dreams is no exception: one of the earliest blog posts I ever wrote about documented my dream reports after taking B6. It’s something that still intrigues the hell out of me to this day.

So why this all fascination with B6?

For one:

B6 is familiar. People aren’t scared to try it out of fear or unfamiliarity, such as that which might be felt in regard to experimenting with other dream potentiators, such as Calea Zacatechichi, African Dream Root, or galantamine.

Yet most importantly:

B6 works. And by that, I mean it tends to have a dramatic effect on the dreams of everyone who tries it. Whereas the aforementioned “dream herbs” are infamous for having mixed results, B6 tends to slam you over the head and take your dreaming mind for a little roller coaster ride! (For me, the dreams tend to always be so intense they become nightmares.)

However, surely knowing that B6 can effect your dreams, I recently had someone ask the question:

“Can B6 Keep Me Awake At Night?”

In my own experience, this has never been the case. Additionally, I have never heard of anyone having problems falling asleep after taking B6. I don’t think there’s any correlation between B6 and insomnia or any kind of sleep problems. I don’t see how it would act on the brain to keep you up.

But, since so many people out there reading this have experience dosing up with B6 to effect their dreams it got me curious: do any of you have any experiences where B6 kept you awake at night?

Please leave a comment below with your experiences taking B6 and if it had any effect on your ability to fall asleep or not fall asleep!

B6Dreams.com launched – new site on b6 & dreams!

Ben — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:50:36 +0000

I’ve just launched a new website documenting this odd connection between B6 and dreams:

http://b6dreams.com

The site is structured as a FAQ document, with links to peoples experiences with B6 and its effects on dreams and lucid dreaming. I’m pretty excited to launch this site – I hope you enjoy it.

If you’ve got a story of your own about taking B6, drop me a line. I’m looking to publish experience reports on b6dreams.com.

Comments, criticisms, and suggestions about b6dreams.com are . . . → Read More: B6Dreams.com launched – new site on b6 & dreams!

Bi-Weekly Dream Report: B6 Dreams, Teeth Falling Out, People Dying, and I’m Back in School. Again, and Again.

Ben — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:53:47 +0000

Since my last dream report roughly a month ago, I’ve been good and written down my dreams nearly every night, had some fun with B6, and paid attention to two themes that just kept coming up in my dreams: work and school, the latter of which is strange since I finished high school in 1999 and attented a tech school for just 18 months in 2004.

Work.

Lots of dreams where I’m at work or interacting in non-work situations with the people I work with. Some of the dreams are stressful, surely a metaphor for the stress of work, but others are just casually strange with little emotion attached to them. Weird. Kinda boring too! I already work 40 hours a day – must I dream about it too?

School.

I have so many dreams where I’m back in school again!

Usually I’ll find myself back in high school, although people I know from both middle and high school make appearances. Even a random girl from third grade showed up in a dream. I don’t recall thinking of her in years nor was she anyone I thought much of back then, just a classmate. Amazing how the mind pulls up such memories!

These dreams about school are starting to run into one another – after waking up I have the distinct feeling that the dream I’ve just had was part of a dream about school from before, and looking back in my dream journal, I can see I did have two dreams a few weeks a part about failing a class and wanting to just start over from scratch rather try and catch up. I’ve not noticed any continuity in my dreams before – and these dreams weren’t exactly like one long storyline, but they were very familiar and similiar in both content and location, so this is very strange to me.

I counted – since June, I’ve had 7 dreams that took place back in school, and 2 dreams taking place elsewhere but had people from school in them.

More Vitamin B6 Dream Experiments

I also did some B6 dream experiments for 3 nights in a row.

B6 definitely can have a crazy effect on my dreams, especially that first night.

(Click here for a more detailed B6 experiment I did last year.)

Here’s a short summary of a 3 day experiment :

Night One: 250MG B6

I had so so many long, detailed dreams, it’s hard to say where one dream ends and another begins.

So, I counted locations instead and found I was in 8 different locations throughout my dreams.

This was one of the nights I dreamt about school. The dream was extremely long and detailed and featured an abnormally large amount of dream characters.

Ultimately it was a metaphor for getting out of my old bad neighborhood, and the sympathy I feel for those still living there. I cannot emphasize how much in the dream I understood what it was like to be oppressed and trapped, but not even know it; it’s just something you’re a part of. It’s just your life.

This was one of those rare and amazing dreams where, upon waking and remembering it, you know you really truly felt something in the dream, something tangible and real, even if it was just emotion.

Night Two: 300MG B6

5 scenes. More dreams about class and a snake that was hundreds of feet long.

Night Three: 350 MG

Went to bed with a bloated stomach and was also very upset about something. Hardly recalled any dreams but damn can you believe it – had another dream with people from my high school. They were both people I see on myspace but don’t talk to their nor in real life.

Dreams of Note

I had the classic dream of MY TEETH FALLING OUT.

My two front teeth simply fell out. I was so so distraught over this and kept running my tongue over my empty gums, telling myself this can’t be real, this can’t be happening, over and over.

Then I partially woke up and could feel my real teeth, and what a wonderful sigh of relief this was to know they were still attached to my gums.

I dreamed that MY WIFE DIED.

It was a horrible, horrible dream. She had died and the agony was brutal. I lost it – animalistic sobbing, primal pain and suffering.

I find it fascinating that I can experience such horrible emotional agony in dream, and I don’t understand the reason for consciously making your dreams pain-free.

I dreamed about a shamanic ritual to the Gods.

It was beautiful, almost like a movie; wonderful cinematography, angles constantly changing, wide views of natural landscapes, timed sequencing of bow and arrows shooting, a Shaman singing a sacred song – perhaps this was the Shaman’s Icaro?

Overall, a beautiful and peaceful dream.

Using Vitamin B6 for Dream Enhancement and Lucid Dreams

Ben — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:46:26 +0000

Summary: Experimenting with doses between 150-400 MG over the course of 5 nights, I discovered that taking B6 in doses between 200-400 MG had an obvious effect on my dreams. They became aggressive, odd, vivid, often mean-spirited and disturbing. Only once did I experience a lucid dream.

Night One: 150 MG B6

I had really bad dreams, but I’m skeptical to contribute this to the B6.

Night Two: 200 MG B6

No discernable effects. I took the pills 2 hours before falling asleep and I believe this is why they had no effect.

Night Three: 200 MG B6

Took my B6 pills immediately before falling asleep this time, and I woke up just two hours after falling asleep with a dream fresh in my mind. I immediately typed up everything still lurking in memory from the dream world. My dreams were very detailed, odd, and unfortunately had no element of lucidity in them, except in the most round-about of ways as noted below.

“I’m running right on Western Boulevard. It’s night time. I’ve got blonde hair – it’s not me, it’s some really cheesy guy. It’s a movie actually. I’m doing all sorts of commando shit. A cop car comes out real quick, first turning away from me and then changing directions because they’re chasing after me. I’m jumping and hiding in trees. They’ve fired missiles at me and I’m able to jump around and dodge from them. The irony is that they end up striking the nuclear material I was trying to destroy. As if this is more of an interactive action movie than a dream, a crazy theme song is now playing. I say some poetically dorky statement ton how I came to destroy these nuclear weapons but the government ended up and destroying their own nuclear weapons in the pursuit of me. Insane rings of fire are wrapping out around me everywhere. These rings of fire (branches too? ) were spiraling up and wrapping around all over the place, with me jumping around them and on them, from one to another… the angle I’m seeing all of was like an action movie with brilliant graphics, like a badass comic book. I’m spiraling up & up and & up. If you’re quick and you’re watching the movie you’re able to jump all in the trees with all the fire wrapping around, and stay with him. At first I can do it but then it gets too fast.”

This part of the dream was particularly vivid. I cannot express how brilliant these rings of fire were and what it was like to be dreaming around them and through them. If only I could have become lucid!
Earlier parts of the dream involved my wife and I being involved in prostitution, pimping and drug dealing. This is the quasi-lucid element of the dream. I dreamt of how my dream was so messed up, and I try to get other people in my dream who seem upset by the dream content to write down their knowledge of the dream so I can compare notes and see if they really know what I dreamt. I wrote:

“Other people know how fucked up the dream I just had was. I try to get them to write it down before telling me, that way we can compare notes. I stress locations -don’t tell me anything now, just write down location and details – hoping that the gutter on Western and Avent Ferry would come up.”

Night Four: 300 MG B6

I know I had three specific dreams, but I only remembered one dream well enough to write it down. This dream was no fun at all. It shared the same theme of my dreams from the first night; betrayal, cheating, jealously. Probably planted by an email conversation I’ve been having with a friend on a related subject.

Night Five: 400 MG B6

I’ve read that around 1000 MG, B6 becomes toxic to the body. At less than half that I experienced chills and tingles throughout my body and woke up with a stomach ache. Because of this I’m not sure if this is a healthy experiment for me to continue.

This is unfortunate, because last night I experienced by far the strangest and most fantastic of dreams out of all these nights. This includes the first lucid dream experienced on B6, of which I wrote the following:

“I had a lucid dream when I first went to bed. By the end, it was quite scary actually. I just remember going to the bathroom in the dream and crossing a mirror and knowing I’m dreaming at this point. I try to breathe firmly and slowly to calm myself down in the dream. I can feel myself breathing in both bodies. I can’t really see myself too good in the mirror. I don’t’ understand the order of what happened next, but somewhere, I either felt a sense of sleep paralysis or imagined would it could feel like and this freaked me out, causing me to wake up. It seemed I really was for a moment in some sort of in between zone where my chest felt paralyzed. I believe this happened because before I went to bed I was reading about an experience with sleep paralysis on the dreamviews.com message board.”

The rest of what I remember is largely one big crazy dream buffered with very scary, unpleasant and for a moment, quite magical feelings, such as the quantum physics elevator. Most of the dreams disturbing aspects related to killing animals that would then split into two animals, constantly regenerated themselves.

I wrote this about it at 1:30 AM, just two hours after I went to bed:

“I’m breaking up my dog Malcolm into two. I do not know why, but it needed to be done – this wasn’t an act of hate or cruelty. I’ve crushed him and he’s broken. I’m splitting him up, CRUNCH, pounding on him, putting my weight on him to crush him, and it’s like he won’t die. He keeps popping back into this little devil of an animal. This never really looked like Malcolm.

There’s this kitten that I’m trying to crush too – except this one comes back perfectly cute and small, with short gray fur nice to the touch. I’ve killed him over and over and every time he just regenerates – and once he comes back, I touch him and his head just fucking falls right off like it’s nothing. I do this a handful of times.

We’re really disgusted and frustrated; we don’t understand how they’re divisible and keep splitting up and regenerating. I’m outside and this one animal shoots out – it was particularly disgusting, horrid, and I believe Iryna called for me to take care of it. She/this woman and another are outside, it’s some sort of European-esque courtyard, with an elevator in the corner.”

Before going to bed I was reading theories on body/mind dualism, and materialism. The references to Aristotle’s thoughts on being able to conceive of the body as divisible but not the mind as divisible (thus the mind can exist without the body, he thought) crept up in this dream in the form of dead or dying animals dividing their bodies into two separate beings. Crazy!

At this point I must have entered the elevator which was taking me to work, because this is what I remember next:

“In the elevator it’s like a different world. The experience is very positive. Quantum physics has everything in two states at once. I’m tall and short. I can see a crazy reflection of myself in the walls. Erv is in there – I look at him and flex my body while making a face and joking around that he’s a brick wall because he’s so buff and strong. Malinda and I are saying this is what makes the job cool – cool stuff like this. I’m telling her how quantum physics allows for something to be in two physical states at once – like two different sides of the same coin – and then these two sides follow a different timeline, separately, but at the same they’re not separate. She’s saying how stuff like this amazes her but just loses her, however it’s parts of the job like this that are just so cool.”

I then get off the elevator and pass up a sushi lunch on the way to my desk to see what I have to do today. My work place isn’t the office building is truly is in real life – it’s more like a grocery store. Before I get to my desk I realize I don’t work here anymore, and I find it incredulous that I showed up and even interacted with some of my coworkers in the elevator and no one remembered that last week was my last day! (Which is true – I quit last week to start a new job this week.)

The last dream I remember – instead of writing it down in the middle of the night, I lazily – dammit! – continued back to sleep and wrote down only a few details upon waking, with the feeling that I really missed something big and important. The dream came to me with the title of ‘The Telepathic Universe’, most definitely a reference to the book I’ve recently read called The Dreaming Universe. The most compelling memory involves going through a looped sequence of events in which I’m fighting and attacking and pursuing some goal. The details changed every time but the overall structure of the loop was the same.

“An elevator door would open and I wouldn’t know what was coming out – it was a woman, and once I believe it was a lizard, and now I’m having images of men with bug heads – and as soon as the doors open I charged in and killed them. They disappear simply by my striking them. My present was then a circular block that opened with keys inside them, which I’d use to move on to the next thing. The keys were large and ancient looking, almost like novelty keys or keys you’d see in a videogame.

I cannot escape this feeling that there was much more to this dream and a very real reason why I awoke with this thought of ‘the telepathic universe’ in my mind. Could it be that each loop represented a sort of parallel universe and the keys connected them all? Oh if only I could remember!

Final Thoughts…

It blows my mind that two nights I awoke just two hours after taking the B6 and falling asleep having experienced very vivid dreams. I thought the way REM worked wouldn’t allow for such dreams to occur so early in the stages of sleep. What exactly then does B6 do to the brain and to the natural structure of REM occurrences?

For those who are able to easily gain lucidity when after taking it – congratulations, I envy you. This didn’t work for me, except for once, at a dose that I have serious considerations of its safety after repeated usage. I’ve read of many people who experience a lucid dream the first time they take a high dose of B6 – this is great! Yet I wonder what role the expectations placed on B6 has in experiencing a lucid dream. Can high doses of this vitamin inherently cause lucid dreams- and if so, what is it about B6 and the brain that causes this to happen? OR is there a placebo effect involved here? Could it be that what creates the lucid dream is not the B6 but the expectation that B6 is going to cause a lucid dream?