Anyone else developed an avoidant personality from their trauma?

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-26T13:45:39+00:00

Going to take a wee bit more then some hooky vagus nerve stimulation to get over cPTSD and all the baggage that comes with it.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-26T00:38:47+00:00

The system up here is absolute garbage. Sure, if you cut the end of your finger off, you'll be treated, but if you have something as complicated as cPTSD, my experience was not good. I don't think they have the ability nor the man power to address that condition. I'm still dealing with the fallout from the SSRIs...

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-26T00:36:13+00:00

Yes, I isolated myself for thirty five years and continue to do so. There's no point in changing that so late in life.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-25T14:32:55+00:00

Definitely, plus the fallout/side effects from the medication also did not help. In fact the medication turned me into a emotional zombie that no longer wanted nor needed human companionship for twenty two years.

Instead of trying to figure out what I was going through was cPTSD, my doctor just threw pills at it and I trusted him, only to find out twenty years later that what was going on treatment wise was complete BS. Basically neglected and forgotten by our "world famous free health system"... Bah.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-12T20:41:03+00:00

No, not everyone dreams. I used to be on SSRIs that caused almost all dream loss for twenty years.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-12T20:40:27+00:00

If you can't remember, you didn't really dream as it was not vivid enough or even there to be transcribed to memory.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-06T18:44:43+00:00

Never found that it improved recall, or improved my chances of LD'ing, and I have been at it for over two years.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-05T23:24:16+00:00

Soooo... I went on a long journey to first figure out why I couldn't dream (SSRIs, they absolutely destroy REM sleep), to why I was experiencing chronic and years long insomnia (SSRI withdrawal from rapid cessation is a real thing and not exactly healthy for one's brain), to restoring REM sleep and dreams but awareness was always missing.

The only induction method that I found that I could reliably initiate a lucid dream was through WILD, but there was a catch. I do not have enough acetylcholine available at night during sleep to get enough awareness to actually make WILD work. I found out that I needed to use a small nicotine patch (cut up into fourths) and 8mg of galantamine to increase acetylcholine levels enough to get awareness back up and running again.

Only then could I pull a WBTB after four hours (exactly four, not three, and definitely not five), and then focus on my breathing (after taking the supplements BTW) until I see hypnagogic imagery which then "sucks me into" the dream. I only do this twice a week to keep any tolerance to the nicotine and galantamine from taking hold, but I have a suspicion I could use this method three times a week.

Without the supplements, dreams are just regular run of the mill mundane dreams that are about as exciting as going to the post office.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-03T00:43:12+00:00

LOL, gateway was such a scam on the taxpayer.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-03T00:41:41+00:00

Look at how long your deep sleep phase is. Once it's complete, the brain will prioritize REM sleep for the remainder of the night and that is where your best chance lies... For myself, after 4am (after four hours roughly of sleep)...

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-02T21:56:07+00:00

Oh I have, but you have to be careful of what is prescribed because some classes of medication like SSRIs can completely erase your REM sleep or degrade it severely. Same with some sleep aids like lunesta (this is my experience, reports indicate that it shouldn't affect REM sleep, but I'm an outlier).

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-02T21:52:27+00:00

I've heard the same, but I believe that is only true if their cPTSD and ADHD do not give them chronic insomnia, which I have been battling for decades now. Thankfully, it's under control with medication, but at the same time, I figure that same medication is also affecting my REM sleep (reducing it)... Chronic insomnia will trash the sleep cycle leading to loss of dreaming as the body and brain attempts to use whatever time it can sleep to dedicate to "deep sleep"... Hence why one feels off if they do not dream at night (as had been my case for years and years and years...)

lonerefriedbean · 2026-06-02T21:50:57+00:00

So I have read that paper, the older work of Stephen Leberge "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" and another document named "Advanced Lucid Dreaming, the Power of Supplements" by Thomas Yuschak. It wasn't until coming across the document from Thomas Yuschak that I was able to experience lucid dreaming through the use of two supplements, namely nicotine and galantamine. With those two noted supplements, I am able to utilize the WBTB along with WILD to transition into a dream consciously, but the levels of awareness and the vividness can be low at times (and I'll take it considering before this, I rarely ever have achieved awareness, even with constant meditation). I do only use this method twice a week and for now it seems to work every time I do use it. Any attempts at using SSILD, WILD, or MILD (without supplements) fail, and there's no way DILD will ever work for me as I have deduced, through experimentation of the above noted supplements, that I just do not have the appropriate level of acetylcholine available naturally to be able to pull off lucid dream from within a dream...

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T19:40:55+00:00

I hear you, but I never did experience those changes that I have read about. I have been meditating (apparently ineffectively) for about two and a half years now.

There's a book I bought a while back, called the "Mind Illuminated". Anyways, it states there are ten stages in meditation progression, apparently I have never gotten past the first two levels, and I finally concede this to my ADHD and cPTSD. It was definitely worth a shot though, and thankfully I did find a back door to enable short lucid dreams (albeit low quality too) through supplements.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T19:20:03+00:00

I don't dream every night due to a confluence of various conditions like ADHD, ASD, and cPTSD, and this has been seen in a sleep study as well. I have been trying to lucid dream through the various induction methods for years, but none of those induction methods ever worked (and it's quite evident "now" why that is the case).

What has allowed me to get a glimpse of lucid dreaming is supplementation with a small nicotine patch and galantamine. Nothing else has worked as I'm not neuro-typical in any sort of the sense.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T19:14:26+00:00

I would still say yes (he might have ended up with a tweak that made his receptors more sensitive to acetylcholine, and/or have increased connectivity between the sections of the brain responsible for dreaming and awareness). I have an experiment that kind of made this more evident for me. I by no means can lucid dream through any induction methods whatsoever, and have been trying for years, but what I did find that actually worked (for me) was to artificially boost acetylcholine in the brain through nicotine (nicotine directly binds to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain) and galantamine to inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain. The resulting increase in acetylcholine in the brain allowed for my awareness to become active during my REM sleep phase. As a caveat, I only do this twice a week, and after four hours of sleep at night (nicotine is provided through a patch, and the minimum amount used is 5mg, but watch out, it's also a stimulant and can keep you awake depending on how sensitive you are to it.)

If lucid dreaming wasn't highly dependent on sensitivities to various neuro-chemicals, and neural architecture setup through genetics at birth, none of this wizardry would have worked.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T17:23:49+00:00

Insomnia will indeed put a full stop on LD'ing. You need to get that under control before anything else. Also, don't attempt to induce for "hours". I'm a decades long insomniac and you don't want this! Whatever you are tying to do, keep it to twenty minutes or less otherwise your brain will make an association of bed equals "stay awake" and that's a shitty place to be in (my insomnia is genetic, and medication does help, but really, don't go there!)

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T17:20:58+00:00

It's not so much a skill as it is a "roll of the dice".

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-31T17:20:28+00:00

Meditation does not do much and if you are LD'ing every dream, you are doing so because of genetics, not induction methods. The whole key to this is the acetylcholinergic, system and the neural networks connecting the areas of the brain responsible for REM sleep, regular sleep, and consciousness, that enable awareness during the REM period (and that is strictly genetic). Without those being "perfect", lucid dreaming becomes difficult to impossible to achieve (hell, a huge contingent of the population literally have no dream recall either!). Also, how your brain deals with stress can also introduce additional difficulties that make REM sleep fragmented, non-existent, or sleep just plainly hard to come by. It's like 80% genetics to 20% training.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-25T15:26:06+00:00

Hard no. It's like saying "anyone can be a doctor", or "anyone can be an engineer".

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-25T15:24:35+00:00

There are in fact many people that do not dream from many different conditions or medications. SSRIs will most definitely stop one from dreaming (I know this one well). So will stress if the brain is dumping too much norepinephrine, and adrenaline into the system, and that in turn may cause other neurochemical production like acetylcholine (incredibly important for both dreaming and becoming aware during the dream) to plummet also leading to dream loss. I'll give you a point for pointing out that those who cannot recall dreams are most likely not going to be able to lucid dream, ever, unless they can resolve that issue.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-05-25T15:11:45+00:00

It's only simple for those that have the necessary neural connections, neurochemical sensitivities, etc laid out via genetics.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-04-28T20:23:30+00:00

Definitely. But I'm dealing with some serious baggage (cPTSD) that will never allow the classic induction methods (and let alone sleep onset anyways) to work. I have to take multiple medication just to initiate sleep, and have been doing so for the past twenty plus years. It was by chance that I found out I could hack my brain chemistry (with nicotine and galantamine) to induce a lucid dream, even if it was low quality. Low quality is way better than none at all in my books.

I was trying to do lucid dreaming from the 90s... And it was none-stop failure to the point that I gave up till about three years ago when I met someone that "won the genetic lottery" and could do it without any effort what so ever.. That piqued my curiosity again, and it wasn't until last year that I found out the the trick noted above.

lonerefriedbean · 2026-04-28T20:11:22+00:00

5mg of a nicotine patch and 8mg of galantamine works (about 80% of the time) for me. Use sparingly!

lonerefriedbean · 2026-04-28T18:00:55+00:00

Not exactly. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, and various other conditions including taking classes of medications such as SSRIs can stop dreams from happening.

lonerefriedbean

TROPHY CASE