Alyzarin

Alright, so this time I decided to take 500 mg of L-arginine before going to bed to see what the effect would be.... This one wasn't based so much on neurochemistry research so much as just going off of anecdotal evidence. Vivid dreams are not infrequently reported with L-arginine. My trial with it was interesting.... My first impression was that it had been unsuccessful. I awoke after roughly seven hours of sleep without memory of any other awakenings and no dream recall at all. You know, often even when you don't remember your dreams you can still remember that you experienced something, you just don't know what it was. Not so with this... I had a totally blank slate. I remembered thinking a couple things, but that's it. I wasn't even sure if those were actually parts of dreams or not. I also woke up very much "in the mood", another reported effect, so I figured that that would probably be the end of it and I wouldn't really get anything out of it because I generally have a hard time falling back to sleep in that case. Then I rolled over and passed out very quickly.

And here's... what I got.

Emotional Responses [Non-Lucid]

My memory first really steps in when I was locked in the bathroom in my house in the dark, lying in the bathtub. Probably related to the fact that I took a bath last night, but there was no water in it in the dream. The fact that it was almost pitch black makes this part of the dream a little hazy in my memory, but otherwise the dream was quite vivid. I had some memory of what exactly was going on.... Basically, there was this evil witch, or some other dark force, who was haunting our house, and she worked by using illusions to play with your emotions and lure you into her traps. I guess that's what was going on here, because there were bats flying all around the bathroom and I was freaking out. Likely inspired by the fact that I watched The Dark Knight Rises last night, too. I kept trying to imagine the bathroom door opening up hoping that it actually would somehow, and trying to get the bats to do things with my mind because I guess I realized that it was just another illusion, but it wasn't working. Finally I took a chance and overcame my fear and just ran for the door and made it out to the hallway. I met my mom there, and we both ran out to the main part of the house.

Let me give a quick description here.... At the end of this hall, immediately to the front and left is a little walkway after the front door, and just beyond that is the living room. If you go right and follow the walkway to its end you get to the kitchen and eventually the laundry room, and just beyond the kitchen in the same direction as the living room is the den. Finally, there's a bar in its own little square design placed directly in the four corners of these rooms, so you can continuously walk through all four of them without changing direction if you just walk around the bar over and over again. Got it? Alright, so basically, my mom and I went right into the kitchen and my mom started frantically searching for things on the counter. All of the lights in the house were still out except for the distant one in the laundry room, and she started telling me to look for the "seven-fruited" something.... I can't remember exactly what it was, but the point was that it would hold seven souls, or seven fragments of the witch's soul, or something like that that would basically mean that she was somehow weakened without it, and it would be actually be just some basic household object we wouldn't just have immediately suspected. My mom ended up running through the den into the living room and searching through presents or something beneath a tree that didn't look like a Christmas tree but was exactly where ours always was, and I followed her because I was afraid that she was going to get caught in an illusion somehow since she was freaking out. I started looking around the house to make sure nothing was going on since she was lost in her own world.

I stepped back on the walkway where the hall ends and looked down into the kitchen again. That's when I saw him.... My cat that just died in waking life was sitting on one of the machines in the laundry room and just staring right at me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this was wrong, but I was struck with an overwhelming desire to run up to him, and I called out to him as I did so. (Yup, I'm the dumb girl that dies in this horror movie.) As I was looking at him this weird phantom double of his face kind of burst out at me and made me feel kind of like this trance state blip, and then the scene had changed. We were in some creepy kitchen that I was unfamiliar with and I was a little nervous, but I didn't care. He was sitting on the kitchen counter now, and I ran up to him and started holding him and petting him, but something was wrong.... He felt real but he was totally still and lifeless, and his head was really turned or twisted to the side in a bizarre way. He didn't try to move or respond to anything that I did and I was becoming emotional, and then I felt this ominous feeling starting to creep up on me... but then I woke up.

I'm not sure if I'll be trying this supplement again yet.