Having been an active dream programmer over 40 years (started when I was 8 when my dreams tipped me off I could dream in movie influences after a Star Wars-themed dream ) and a lucid dreamer since 1987 I can tell you this, none of that came with stimulants or using a drug. It all came from developing the skill over time with trial/error and practice.

Drug use to stimulate dreaming has short-term gains and long-term consequences that are not always apparent in the beginning because it cascades over time with the loss of gain.

Sure you may get a temporary boost but nothing long-term and diminished gains if that was your dependency to have resulted in the first place because a stimulant isn't providing growth neurologically.

The other problem with some drugs to stimulate dreaming is that they can cause substance-induced nightmares for some people, and fear is the dream killer always. That shuts more people down as dreamers than anything else.

I know a lot of dreamers, been active online for decades who take the stimulation path and end up burned out later on or quit all together. It's not a requirement at all to learn to dream.

Dreaming is a skill, just like learning to play the piano or do art, it's also a language between you and your subconscious mind as an interface of thoughts, experiences etc. Like any skill, our brain develops neural pathways which if you understand learning and skill development hard-wires skills so they are performed quickly. Because they are developmental we need to keep training in a skill until that hard-wire development becomes the norm, and if we stop a skill the brain really does repurpose our neural-pathways for the new skills or focus we have and the other skill will become rusty if it's not ever used again over time.

The problem with the dream community is it's like the bodybuilding community where you have good information and misinformation regarding diet and techniques, except I think it's far worse in the dream community as nearly everyone seems to get caught in the stimulating with drugs to dream or take this pill and you will dream thinking to dream is somehow outside the realm of cognitive skill development.

The other problem is that people don't know our ability to dream does atrophy due to lack of participation. The neural pathways for those rich dreams we used to have without use begin to decline. That's how atrophy works in the brain. So the real goal is to get those neural pathways stimulated by performing actively the skill we want to progress in.

There are three neurological regions that dreams rely on to be useful to us:

1) Memory for dream recall (The Medial Prefrontal Cortex )
2) 5-Sensory Replay ( The Somatosensory regions )
3) Awareness (The Prefrontal Cortex )

So how do we train for these regions to get them stimulated? Work with the dreaming mind leveraging it's own mechanics through training like going to the gym with a routine.

The other area is the psychological nature of dreams, knowing how to become orientated, stable, intent focused and do the inevitable house cleaning of releasing old fears and negative beliefs that might create a psychological inhibitor on dream participation.

After all that, the rest is just skill development within the dream itself like architecting your own lucid dream content based on your intent.

So you want to train for dreaming starting at the basic foundations as your brain starts to come out of atrophy and the results start to emerge over time like they do for any skill because it takes time for those neural pathways to develop through repeat stimulation.

Lots of people want to know what supplements to take to have stimulated dreams, not what techniques to apply to train the skill. It's like taking protein powder without exercise at the gym.

Dreaming should be an active, not passive skill for those interested in developing the ability to dream.

I've had people just interested in one or two aspects of dreaming as in, just being able to recall them again and nothing more. Or getting the bootstrap process working and staying there because it too can be very rewarding without the immersion into a dream. Everyone will develop to where they are most comfortable, others will excel like a grand pianist with this skill honing and training and challenging themselves regularly.

But without training, routine and just letting the brain do passive dreaming without any effort the atrophy comes back, and comes back quick sadly.

I've had people start to bring dream recall from once a month to 3 times a night then back to no dreaming because they stopped the process of actively recalling their dreams before the atrophy becomes resolved, the brain habitually snaps back to atrophy and they are like... why am I not remembering my dreams again, I did the course.

I ask, have you continued to keep with the routine and effort to recall them in the morning.

No, I got too busy so haven't been putting in the effort.

Well... you get what you put into it and lose what you gain when you don't keep up with the stimulation of those regions.

Hopefully, my work will help break everyone out of dreaming as a passive skill where drugs and wishful thinking work better than simple training and exercise for cognitive dream development.

Get a dream plan, a dream routine and work on the atrophic deficiencies over time and know as those little gains emerge the bigger results come with that foundation you are building, just like any skill you would learn.

There are no short-cuts to developing neurologically short of consistency and persistence for any skill, dreaming is no exception to that rule.