L-Theanine For Lucid Dreams: Avoiding Nightmares, Dosage and More

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🌙 Written by Stefan Zugor, international lucid dreaming expert and teacher. Learn how to lucid dream in 7 days or less.

Smart drugs, also known as nootropics are substances that have the ability to improve the cognitive functions in people. This means that the motivation, memory and creativity are significantly increased.

One such substance is L-Theanine. However, this substance also aids in inducing lucid dreaming. In fact, it’s very well known that this is a GREAT supplement for lucid dreaming and it works even if you’re a beginner lucid dreamer

How does L-Theanine make you lucid dream?

Specifically, what L-Theanine does, is help you relax and reduces stress and it also boosts the alpha waves in your brain. This means that you will be calm, but not sleepy and you are going to experience lucid dreams after you fall asleep.

This substance is actually an amino acid, and it’s most commonly found in green tea. However, there is very little L-Theanine found in green tea, which means that you will have to drink a lot of it before you can get the desired effects. That is why it’s better to take it as a supplement instead of drinking gallons of tea. You can easily find it as a supplement in most vitamin shops or even online.

The benefits of taking L-Theanine

Taking this supplement has numerous benefits to your overall health. First of all, it helps you fall asleep a lot faster at bedtime and it also improves your sleep quality. This is due to its ability to improve relaxation while lowering stress. Research also showed that most people tend to wake up a few times during the night while taking this supplement, which also adds to inducing lucid dreaming.

Another benefit is that it greatly reduces anxiety. Some of the anti-anxiety medication can have sedative effects, which are usually unwanted. However, L-Theanine helps you relax without making you sleepy. Instead you’re fully awake and alert and yet relaxed at the same time. This is also a similar result of meditation.

L-theanine doesn’t only help you relax mentally, but it also reduces the physical symptoms of stress. So it works both ways. Physically, it lowers the blood pressure and the heart rate, both of which are higher with anxiety and stress. According to studies, this supplement can also lower the anxiety in people that have schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

When it comes to decreasing the feelings of stress and anxiety, L-Theanine also lowers the levels of the stress hormone corticosterone, which is greatly increased when you are under stress. This hormone, along with cortisol both inhibit some of your brain activity, such as spatial learning and memory formation. This means that while you are stressed, you will have trouble remembering as well as trouble with directions. L- Theanine helps you lower this stress hormone, thus helps you continuously learn and remember.

This is part of the reason it’s one of the many substances referred to as ‘smart drugs’. This supplement also increases your attention span and reaction time, in addition to improving your memory and learning abilities.

How does it actually affect lucid dreaming?

Well, several users of L-Theanine reported feelings of ‘child-like’ dreaming after taking the supplement. This is because the supplement reverses the inhibition of slow-wave brain frequencies and REM cycles that caffeine tends to stimulate.

L-Theanine can help you fall asleep, but any sleep is usually very light. This means that it’s easy to wake up and go back to sleep several times during the night. During these instances when they were asleep, users have reported having several lucid dreams each night.

Another supplements that most users state to take along with L-Theanine is Melatonin. This is because Melatonin has the ability to suppress the REM cycle and makes it easier for you to lucid dream.

How to take L-Theanine (dosage)

If you’re planning to take L-Theanine through tea, on average a cup of green tea has 7.9mg of L-Theanine. This is slightly higher with black tea, at 24.2mg. And the longer you brew the tea, the higher concentration of L-Theanine it’s going to have in it.

However, if you’re planning on taking the nootropic route, the supplements of L-Theanine range from 100mg to 200mg dosages. The acceptable daily intake is 400mg.

If you’re taking it for sleep, stress or other reasons, 100mg to 400mg is recommended. If you’d like to combine it with caffeine, you should take 12-100mg of L—Theanine and 30-100mg of Caffeine. And if you’d like to take it along with Melatonin, the recommended dosage is around 200mg of L-Theanine and 0.5mg of Melatonin.

Keep in mind that the effects of both Caffeine and Melatonin do not last long, while L-Theanine has effects for 8-10 hours and it begins about 30 minutes after you absorb it.

Possible side-effects of L-Theanine

Generally, L-Theanine is well-tolerated with healthy adults.

However, there are possible side effects with several different conditions and some interactions with other medications. Specifically, you should consult a doctor if you’d like to take L-Theanine if you are pregnant or breast-feeding, if you’d like your child to take it, and if you have low blood pressure, because it also lowers the blood pressure.

If you’re taking any medication to treat high blood pressure, low blood pressure or any supplements that contain caffeine. L-Theanine can interrupt the effects of medicine for high blood pressure and the effects of caffeine supplements. And it additionally lowers the blood pressure which may cause your blood pressure to drop too low if you take it.

So, there’s no need to drink gallons of tea and rush to the bathroom in the middle of the night if you’d like to experience lucid dreaming with the help of L-Theanine. You can benefit of the soothing properties with the supplement, and enjoy your lucid dreaming experience!

L-theanine causing nightmares?

There have been a few stories online (mainly forums) saying that when they take l-theanine they get crazy nightmares. I think this is a very subjective area, because it DOES affect your dreams and make them more vivid. If you’re not very experienced at lucid dreaming that could make you just have more vivid or intense versions of the dreams you’re already having, which for some people would feel like a nightmare.

However, if you KNOW how to lucid dream, then that will just make the lucid experience more intense and vivid. It’s all about how you as a person can take it and what level of skill you have at lucid dreaming.

I’d suggest going through my lucid bootcamp while you wait for your supplement to arrive (if you’re ordering some to give it a try). That way you’ll be prepared, and you’ll be able to have lucid dreams instead of nightmares!

Where to get L-Theanine?

To get this nootropic, you have a few options. You could get it as part of a cognitive enhancer like Optineuro, or you could get the individual supplement, it depends on what you’re going to use it for. I find that the L-theanine content in Optineuro is more than enough!

Alternative nootropics

If you’re interested in nootropics, there are actually some alternatives you might want to consider. 

  • Mind Lab Pro: A powerful all natural nootropic that I personally use almost every single day. I even take this traveling with me and it’s the closest I’ve found to the ‘limitless pill’
  • Optineuro: A powerful nootropic that I also use every day along with Mind Lab Pro but this one DOES contain caffeine so be careful if you already drink coffee
  • CILTEP: This stands for chemically induced long term potentiation. It’s a nootropic that aims to improve your brain, even after you’ve STOPPED taking it