By Paul Muchowski, Ph.D.

I have just published a new article on Medium, In Your (Weird) Dreams: CBD and Sleep, about a comment I hear often: that CBD gives people strange, vivid dreams. What follows is a short summary of its argument.

The vivid, narrative dreams we remember are overwhelmingly a product of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM is one of the two restorative sleep stages, alongside deep, slow-wave sleep, and it is when the brain processes emotion and integrates experience. Yet very few people associate dreaming with sleeping well. We think of a good night as one we do not remember, when a night rich in dreams is often a night rich in REM.

The brain also keeps a ledger. When it is deprived of REM, it makes up the difference once it can, an effect that William Dement demonstrated in 1960 and that sleep researchers call REM rebound. Rebound REM arrives sooner in the night, lasts longer, and runs more intensely than ordinary REM. A REM deficit can build over years of poor sleep, or from nightly habits that suppress REM, including alcohol, which shows a dose-dependent suppression of REM beginning at roughly two standard drinks, and sleep aids that contain THC.

So when someone tells me that CBD gave them weird dreams, the most likely explanation is that they had been short on REM for a long time, and their brain is catching up. The dreams are not a sign that something is wrong. For most people, they settle as the deficit clears.

I formulated Defined Sleep and found that it increased the restorative stages, deep and REM, without THC, and I then ran a trial to verify it: an FDA-registered, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized crossover Phase 2 trial, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine and registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05233761). Measured nightly with a validated wearable, the formulation increased time spent in deep and REM sleep, by up to twofold in the participants who responded most strongly.

There is one important exception. For people who live with PTSD or other trauma, the return of REM sleep can mean the return of distressing nightmares that replay what happened to them. That is not a sign of recovery, and it is not something a supplement should address. It should be treated by a physician.

[Read the full article on Medium]([MEDIUM ARTICLE URL]). To see the clinical trial results, visit https://definedsleep.com/pages/clinical-trial.