This technique is well known ( I suppose ), but I’ll put it there cause some people ask me what it was :
I prefer to take an excerpt from a Robert Waggoner interview. ( He is an experienced LDer ).
I learned lucid dreaming in the same way. A strange detail : nothing in the book tells “that before going to sleep I should look at my hands and suggest to myself to see them in the dream state.” But I used the same technique !
what if you find your hands in your dream…and they look normal and you dont become lucid 
Whether your hands are strange or not doesn’t matter with this technique. Finding your hands in a dream makes you become aware that you are dreaming.
The first time it happends, I was so happy : “Waw, I found my hands !” that I woke up. But it’s a common problem with lucid dreaming.
i dont get it…why would it make you concious when you see your hands…
I don’t know ! 
But it works… it’s perhaps a kind of magic… 
More seriouly : you’re right. In the first attempts, I had a lot of normal dreams where I saw my hands, but it didn’t make me conscious. When I woke up, I realized that and was upset ! 
But after few days, seeing my hands in my dreams made me conscious. It’s perhaps a sort of induced dreamsign ?
hmm…ok 
that does it for me…hehe. ill start doing this method fluently. thanks so much basilus west 
It just opens that train of memory with the statement “I am dreaming” atached to it
your logic IRL tells you this statement is wrong but when you are dreaming you believe it
I have to agree with ww3ace. As i read through this thead i was thinking ‘huh? it must be some conditioning thing’. In waking life (logic dominance) it doesnt make sense. But something such as a conditioned response is more abstract (hard to understand, yet it works very well). Personally, ive looked at my hands many a time in my dreams (and sometimes as an RC) and many a time such has not caused me to go lucid (even the RC-intention ones). One time i was examining my hands in wonder too (cuz they were luminant) but i didnt become lucid. (looking at my hands also helps with stability but thats something totally different). Personally, i dont think theres anything special about looking at your hands, or your feet, or at a mirror, or at your reality, whatever, that its the actual consideration that counts. Im not bashing it or anything, just being analytical and i must add that such a type of technique is very effective for those it fits, its not for me though. My own technique is WILD and Awareness Conditioning.
Then again you could condition yourself to just automatically become lucid, skipping the realization that your dreaming and just jumping into lucidity.
Woa, i just realized that these forums are totally insane. I mean, look, here we are developing all these techniques that work for a variety of people. Its multiple paths to a goal - lucid dreaming. I mean, when you got multiple paths like that, actively being developed, etc, that is advancement. Seriously, we should all collaborate and write a book.
sentient…the hands method isnt just seeing your hands. Before you sleep you make an intent to see/find your hands in your sleep. and when you do find them, your mind has completed the task that you intended it to, and it makes you lucid. basilus did say that in his first dreams…he looked at his hands and nothing happened…but as he progressed, he became lucid from looking at his hands. it will work if you train yourself.
basilus…do we use WBTB with this method? I went to that website where u got the ROBERT-LUCY convo off of from google…and they made it seem like u do get up. so…do you or dont you?
Bendrummin58, I understand that you feel very happy of finding your hands in a dream… but please, please don’t post the same question in every thread you find ! 
… so I haven’t to answer the same thing in many threads. 
Anyhow, my answer will better find its place here :
It’s very funny that everybody here I told about this method thinks : “Uh ? How the hell could it work ?” 
: it works, and very well.
In my opinion, it’s a sort of MILD, and perhaps more clever than MILD, because in MILD, the only thing you have is a kind of fuzzy goal ( to be lucid, but when you begin, you damn don’t know what it is ). But here, the goal is obvious : find your hands in your dreams. As you understood it, the intention of being lucid, though it is not explicitly formulated, is attached with the actionof searching something in a dream. Your hands become a dreamsign yet.
Sentient, of course, you found your hands many times in your dreams, but didn’t become lucid, cause your intention was not focused on finding your hands. On this point, BenDrumming58’s answer was very clear.
This technique is not a brand new technique : it has been first published in 1972 and a lot of the most famous lucid dreamers used it or even learned LD with it. It has been the theme of a S. Laberge’s experiment. A lot of threads or DD on LD4all mention it. I posted it there because it will be more easy to find for beginners.
Last thing : Sentient, you’re right, there is nothing special in the hands. You can try to find anything else in your dreams. Here is the excerpt of the “Journey to Ixtlan” where it’s told about this method :
=> PS : Sentient, do you explain the Awareness Conditioning somewhere ?
You say that after ~300 posts. I think I’ll actually not give my usual marketing talk here. Just examine my signature. 
Hehe damn, my bad. I guess i musta over-skimmed that one. Ah, i see, another conditioning thing, very effective i like conditioning. I wonder if its possible to condition automatic lucidity (without realization)…
Again, sorry, i didnt realize (until just now actually) that theres two ways:
Conditioning the actual consideration that you may be dreaming. hand/feet/watch/whatever RC
Conditioning the intention to become lucid. (what we see here, right? maybe thats how it works)
The second i must say is rather ingenious. Its like a variation of MILD, the carrying over of the intent-to-become-lucid into the actual dream itself.
and then i scroll up the next post to see:
Couldnt have said it better myself.
I tend to use my hands a lot more for stability than as a method of becoming lucid (in one way or another). So, in that regard it will probably conflict should i try this method. Then again, it may supplement lucidity…
Awareness Conditioning…i should have been more clear on that. Im the type that invents terminology and assumes other people understand what i mean. when theres no way they actually can, yeah its messed up, but im also lazy
I guess, basically, its like improving your awareness IRL (of environment, self, and others) and that carrying over into your dreams. If youre doing it right (and consistently, ie habituating/conditioning), you’ll start to notice more and more that youre dreaming when you do/experience weird stuff as this new habit carries over into your dreams. I dont know if this is like Lucid Living or not. I once glanced at the thread (though the size daunted me) and saw it stated that its living as if you were in a lucid dream, in which case its very different than what i do.
Well, your salesman’s pitch could use some work. Just kidding. Ive actually given some serious thought to contributing to that wiki in particular, but that would require that i type up all my techniques and explain them and all this, work that im having increasingly-less time for these days. Maybe some weekend though, and i’ll probably learn/develop something new from it.
As it sounded “easy” method, i tried it last night.
As i usually don’t pay attention to my hands, then after autosuggestion before sleep i managed to see hands few times, but both times as soon as i saw them and recognized that it is a dream i immedeately woke up 
Then i changed my autosuggestion. At first it was kinda: “If i will see hands in dream i recognize that it is a dream”. I added to it: “…and i will continue to dream in LD”, or similar to prevent awakening.
As i meditated over it between the dreams i was almost “pregnant” to surely see LD tonight. But it happened that another dream sign (not hands) made it for me. I was in my childhood home (my major dream sign) and as i didnt saw my dad there, i said to myself: “If i don’t see him here, i will create him into here” (so it was LD technology thinking in ND), and it probably made me lucid so my next scene was full LD 
But focusing on hand method probably helped my mind to be more aware of the other dream signs also (i skipped through them before going to sleep, too). So i will continue to use it until i will get lucidity through noticing my hands in ND
P.S. It was my earliest LD after going to sleep so far. As i usually get my LD-s in morning before waking up, it happened 4 hours after going to sleep. And i noticed those hands in my dream even earlier. So it must be very effective method even in early cycles of sleep.
Thats cool, that your hand autosuggestion thing possibly helped activate your awareness or something. Congratulations, by the way!
Good luck! 
If it worked for you so soon it will probably work again. The waking up soon thing might just be a beginners disease too (gone thru experience).
When I look at my hands in a dream I get confused because its blurry and I have to really look close. Then I see 5 fingers and a thumb and I remembered that I had 5 fingers but forgot it was including the thumb. It didnt look right so I looked away and looked back and I saw a finger dissapear like it tried to when I wasent looking but wasent fast enough. Then I realized I was dreaming.
i have a clearer way of this method.
this is what made it work for me 3 LDs in a row baby!
How do you look softly? Is it when you unfocus by a tiny bit so the hands are just a little blurred?
no…it means that you don’t focus too hard like your head is about to explode…if that makes sense
How exactly do you practice this when you’re going to sleep? Do you just look at your hands untill you fall asleep or what?
