DOSE:

4+ drops

oral

Entada rheedii

(tincture)

Inconclusive Trials with the African Dream Herb

Background: I know next to nothing about this herb except for what is written [online] about it.

Source: 2X tincture in alcohol sourced online from well-reviewed herbal vendor made from seed pods. I do not know what the conversion factor is between this extract and individual dried seeds in terms of dosage. This plant is apparently traditionally smoked, but I will not be doing that because I do not have the seed pods themselves.

Other Substances: All trials were conducted more than 24 hours after any substance use except for caffeine, which I take daily in the morning in the form of an energy drink, some of which also contained beta-alanine. I am on no medications.

Trial 1:

-1.5 droppers worth of extract consumed with water about 20 minutes (est) before falling asleep
-possibly very mild “different” headspace/feeling while awake after consuming but also very possibly just placebo. If anything, comparable to MAYBE a threshold dose of cannabis. I think it was psychosomatic.
-easy and fast falling asleep (unusual for me, I live in a noisy environment).
-notably vivid dreams but I was not able to effectively recall them.
-some brain fog when I woke up

Trial 2:
-same dose consumed in same manner, this time probably more like 40 minutes before falling asleep.
-definitely abnormally vivid and kind of surreal dreams, again not much recall. I have one distinct memory of a dream in which I was trying to walk to a gas station but there was some kind of emergency going on there that scared me off.
-woke up once or twice and then went back to sleep which is unusual for me

Note: after use 2 I decided to start spacing out uses more, because I don’t actually know what is in this plant and I was worried that using it multiple nights in a row would cause some toxin or another to build up in my liver or something along those lines. I don’t know how real of a risk that actually is but I decided to err on the side of caution.

Trial 3:
-same dose but consumed about 2-2.5 hours before bed
-no discernible effects on dreams.

Trial 4:
-standard dose, consumed about 40 minutes before falling asleep again. I was suffering from a mild cold at this time which usually impacts my sleep quality. I refrained from taking any sort of cold medicine this night for fear of harming my liver if it interacted with any active compounds in the herb. Once again I don’t know how real of a risk that is, but I’d rather not find out the hard way.

-I remember having extremely vivid dreams but again I had almost no ability to recall them even immediately after waking up. I can only remember the vague idea that I was working in a restaurant in a very strange location, I think on the edge of a steep cliff next to the ocean. Sleep was very good and un-interrupted, which is unusual for me when I have any sort of upper respiratory track virus, usually I sleep extremely poorly when I have a cough or post nasal drip.

Trial 5:
-4 drops taken about 60 minutes before bed
-extremely vivid dreams that I could actually remember this time (unlike every other time with this extract), although the dreams were of a surreal, sometimes disturbing nature and seemed to shift between scenes at random. Themes of the dreams included lying to my friends and family, losing or damaging expensive possessions (in particular, crashing what I somehow knew was a very expensive event-photography style drone, which I do not own in real life). Weirdly enough, I dreamed that I was serving in Vietnam but seemingly on the Vietnamese side (I am American with no Vietnamese ancestry and I don’t really ever think about the Vietnam War. I don’t even think I have any close relatives who served in it). I remember distinctly being utterly terrified that I would be killed with napalm and burned alive. I was awoken early in the morning by my roommate, and in a half-asleep state I thought I heard chanting or yelling in the distance. This could have either been an effect of the herb or (more likely) my neighbors in the room nextdoor being loud and boisterous, as they often are at all hours of the day and night. I faded back to sleep and resumed dreaming, more Vietnam but now I think I was an American draftee instead of a VC. I woke up with a pounding headache. I do not think I will take this dose again as the headache lasted hours and my dreams were not pleasant.

Conclusions/Retrospective:

I can confirm that this herb is most definitely active in some regard to dreams, as I expected as to my knowledge it does have a tradition of use in this manner in parts of Africa. It certainly seemed to make my dreams more vivid and eventful, but actually seemed to inhibit dream recall in my case. Beyond that, I don’t think I gained anything particularly insightful about the herb from these (limited) trials. Part of this is my already-stated caution about using a relatively unknown herb without really knowing what compounds - psychoactive and/or not - are present in it, especially in an extracted form. I would suggest others exercise this caution as well as at least one other dream-inducing herb is strongly suspected to be toxic to the kidneys. Additionally, any other health effects it could have are completely unknown. For this reason, along with the general weirdness of the dreams I had at a 4-drop dose and the headache afterwards, I did not go past that dosage.

I would be very interested in any sort of scientific analysis of the compounds present in this plant but I am not aware of any research ongoing in this field.

Further notes:
At some point I would like to try this herb again, but with an increased focus on attempting to induce a lucid dream experience, which I did not really do this time because I don’t know much about lucid dreaming techniques.

Exp Year: 2026	ExpID: 119594
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Mar 2, 2026	Views: Not Supported
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Entada rheedii (733), Dreams (85) : General (1), First Times (2), Combinations (3), Retrospective / Summary (11), Alone (16)