Forget groggy, melatonin generally works as a sleep aid for me but also gives me wildly trippy and fucked up dreams. I stopped using it specifically because of that.

Your dosage was likely too high. I had the same issue using the smallest dose I could find at the pharmacy (5mg) and it was totally fixed by going to a pill one fifteenth of the dosage that I procured online.

I wouldn't be surprised, they were plain OTC 10mg pills but as I read in an article posted fairly recently on HN I learned that the required dose is often much, much smaller than that. My foray with melatonin was a few years ago and I'm not having trouble sleeping now so I haven't dipped my toes into it again.

Just to confirm, my limited understanding is that 10mg is an incredibly high dosage.

Wait until you read this: "Oral administration of 1,000 mg a day of melatonin to five adults for 25 to 30 days resulted in drowsiness being noted as an adverse effect. There were no severe and/or irreversible impacts on clinical parameters (blood pressure, heart rate, ECG, serum chemistry, urine analysis) in these people." Source: Nordlund JJ, Lerner AB. The effects of oral melatonin on skin color and on the release of pituitary hormones. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1977

As is mine, now. Back in the wild days of 2016 or so advice online said "just go get some melatonin and you'll sleep!" and the bottle said to take 1 or 2 an hour before you want to sleep, so off I went.

I take 300mcg time release and it gives me more vivid dreams. Stuff is powerful

0.3mg is the dose you want, apparently https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

Thank you. Man, that explains a lot of my easy to sleep but wake up early in the morning issues.

I bite off tiny pieces of 5mg pills. One pill lasts me about a week and a half

I did this too. Someone had told me at one point the best thing to do to ingest it is to crush it somehow and keep it under your tongue for 30 seconds. And I also knew I wanted very small amounts of the pills I had. So I would take the tiniest nibbles of the chalky pills and leave them in my mouth for a while, until I could feel the effects slightly come on. Grew weirdly fond of the taste.

It seems like that would be very hard to get a consistent dose with such a small amount. Those cuts would need to be extremely precise. It would be more reliable to buy the 1mg children’s dose and cut them in half.

That's the best part, great way to induce lucid dreams consistently.

Melatonin causes wild dreams for me, too, but I actually enjoy them. Free cinema.

Good question. The paper says 0.1 mmol per liter, i.e. fruit is sprayed with a solution containing about 23 milligrams per liter of melatonin.

It's possible that the amount retained would be less than a few milliliters of solution equivalent — less than 100 micrograms under practical consumption patterns — so having little activity. But if the melatonin is absorbed by the fruit, the effect could be significant and particularly problematic since people often eat fruit in the morning.

In any case, I think that a more likely goal of this research (vs actually spraying commercial fruit with melatonin) might be to identify compounds able to produce the same beneficial effect on fruit without causing any adverse effects in humans.