Thread: Magnetic Pineal Gland Stimulation Experiment

DMT is structurally close to melatonin, serotonin and dopamine- it binds to those receptors in brain and creates similar effects as if there is higher concentration of those compounds.

I wonder: if someone who can create lucid dreams has low level of those neurotransmitters - could he create lucid dream even then? What kind of properties would such dream have?

Originally Posted by Psionik

DMT is structurally close to melatonin, serotonin and dopamine- it binds to those receptors in brain and creates similar effects as if there is higher concentration of those compounds.

I wonder: if someone who can create lucid dreams has low level of those neurotransmitters - could he create lucid dream even then? What kind of properties would such dream have?

If you read the literature out there about what's going on in the brain, the activity in the brain regarding those neurotransmitters actually almost goes completely silent. Or rather, dopamine signaling still happens, but serotonin and norepinephrine activity almost completely ceases. When people take drugs that interfere with this, it's observed that it interrupts the dreaming process. The real question is more along the lines of, could a lucid dreamer actually create a lucid dream with higher levels of serotonin and norepinephrine during those stages of sleep?

Also, DMT's pharmacology is much more complex than that. I'm sure you know that, but to describe it as creating similar effects to what would happen if there were simply higher concentrations of those neurotransmitters is simply not the case. For instance, SSRIs aren't psychedelic because it turns out many serotonin receptors are co-localized with some glutamate receptors. Serotonin, when bound to the receptor, does not activate these co-localized glutamate receptors, but psychedelics do. I don't really remember if DMT does anything with melatonin receptors, although I'm pretty sure it doesn't. It's mostly to do with the 5-HT (serotonin) receptors associated with psychedelic activity, sigma receptors (lately these ones have been found to be more important when it comes to its psychoactive effects--most other psychedelics don't activate sigma receptors, but many dissociative drugs do. it's got important implications in why dissociatives are better candidates for testing animal models of schizophrenia that psychedelics are, or at least the psychedelics without sigma activity), a specific dopamine receptor subtype (D1, which is kind of strange since LSD is a D2 agonist instead), and adrenergic receptors. It's far from being as cut and dry as saying it mimics what would happen if there were simply a higher concentration of these neurotransmitters, which is quite often the case with a lot of drugs (keep the co-localized glutamate and serotonin bit, for example).

I don't know much about this stuff. But I thought- if there is higher amount of neurotransmitter during sleep, we dream. Or we can dream. If there is very low amount of them, we are in deep sleep. Now meditation is behaving like deep sleep according to EEG but subject remains conscious...
Also some sources claimed that by OBE is brain in very deep sleep - very low activity. Elsewhere I read about zero brain activity(according to EEG) during OBE, but maybe it wasn't reliable source, or their EEG wasn't sensitive enough...

edit- I don't know how much is this related to this discussion nor how big credibility this information has- but even todler(2.5 years old) had OBE during NDE. But, then again, it was found that during dyeing the activity of brain is abnormally high. Therefore neurotransmitters level must be high too? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98447&page=1