I’ll summarize my experience with B6 here:
After watching Waking Life I was ready to start lucid dreaming wholeheartedly and I remembered reading the same Erowid experience ( erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=2247 ) report about Valerian, B6 and Melatonin. I went to the grocery store later that night and picked up 100 50mg tablets of B6 and 120 Melatonin sleep support pills that also had 10mg of B6 each. I didn’t really know where to get Valerian root, so I decided to try out the other two. At this point I had virtually 0 dream recall, meaning any remembering of dreams were isolated and literally 3+ months in between. Sorry about the length, but I think my being thorough will help validate my conclusions.
Night 1: 210mg B6, 3mg melatonin - when I woke up i remembered the tail end of my dream and wrote it in my DJ
Night 2: 530mg B6, 9mg melatonin - no dream recall
Night 3: 540mg B6, 12mg melatonin - possibly a lucid dream, but if it was there was very little clarity & control, although I did know I was dreaming and tried to control things
Night 4: 540mg B6, 12mg melatonin - was able to maintain consciousness through what I think were the first four phases of sleep (attempting WILD), but then I had to use the restroom, so I scrapped it.
Night 5: 640mg B6, 12mg melatonin - remembered my last dream, recorded in DJ
Night 6: 0mg B6, 0mg melatonin - remembered my last dream, but didn’t write it down and forgot it later
Night 7: 540mg B6, 12mg melatonin - wrote about one side of a 8.5"x11" sheet of college ruled paper (which is what I use for my DJ) describing a very vivid dream
Night 8: 810mg B6, 18mg melatonin - remembered multiple dreams and one very vividly, which I described over one and a half sheets of my DJ
Night 9: 1000mg B6, 15 mg melatonin - My first lucid dream since one that I remember having in childhood! I also remarked to myself in the dream about the clarity and how lifelike it was. I was able to fly and I materialzed objects that I wanted, although without realizing I had done so until afterwards. I recorded it over 2 pages of my DJ.
After this I skipped a night and then took 58mg B6 and 24mg melatonin and had a very vivid dream that took over a page and a half to describe in my DJ. That was three nights ago and I have stopped taking B6 and still have remarkably improved recall and clarity. As far as whether B6 works for dream potentiation or not, I would say it definitely does, though most effectively in doses over 200mg. Also, I suggest that if it doesn’t work for you on the first night and you are still willing to try it, I think there is some initial barrier or something because the most noticeable effects started happening on the third night of taking them.
As for negative side effects, from what I’ve read on Wikipedia and on the link Magic_Dreamer posted earlier ( ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitaminb6.asp ), the overdose of B6 (above 100mg per day) causes temporary deadening of nerve cells and goes away shortly after discontinuing use. From my experience, on either the second or third night I felt a tingling sensation while going to sleep, I haven’t noticed much difference from before taking B6 except that occasionally textures would feel enhanced. Most of the time everything felt normal though. Now that I have not taken any for three days, I have been starting to feel more tingling sensations, which I assume is my nerves coming back to normal. Also, the NIH article said that B6 deficiency can cause dermatitis, and I normally have fairly persistant acne despite washing my face twice daily. But over the last couple weeks my face has been clearing up a lot, and it didn’t occur to me that it might be the B6, until I read that and realized that my acne has been gearing back up again over the last day or two. I can’t really prove any of this last paragraph, but from my experience with it and the bits of reading I have done on it, those are my conclusions.
From now on I will probably discontinue B6 for a week or so and then take 100 or 150mg daily with 1-2 day breaks every week or so to continue developing DR, and hopefully help my skin. Hopefully this was helpful 