i have been using reality checks for quite a while (i am partial to holding my nose and breathing through, and checking my fingers.) and i’ve gotten on a generally good schedule with them. but the thing is, however frequent my checks are, i don’t think they’re genuine.
what i do when i reality check is just kind of HOPE i’ll fail the check. mentally will air to come through my nose or will my hands to have 8 fingers or 13 fingers. but i don’t think that will cut it.
it’s because i don’t know how to question my surroundings. everything is so normal that i physically CANNOT bring my mind to doubt this is real.
I’m not sure if this works but what I try to do when doing my state checks is try convince myself that everything that I am seeing and sensing around me is in my head and that I am truly at home in my bed sleeping. This may be counter-intuitive because I’m not sure that when your in a lucid dream that you want to be thinking about your physical body too much but nonetheless it feels like it works for convincing myself that I may be dreaming.
Yep, you don’t want to think about your real body. For me that leads to waking up without fail.
It’s easier to question reality if something weird happens. For example, I saw a black cat crossing the road. After it was gone from my vision, another black cat crossed and I had to RC. Another time I saw a huge disco ball hanging from the ceiling in a computer store. There is no reason to keep a disco ball there so I had to RC. I understand that it’s hard to really question reality if nothing remotely weird happens. Then I would suggest just maintaining high awareness and searching for weirdness, even if it doesn’t happen.
Over 50% of the time when I get a DILD or MILD, it happens without the need to RC. However, I tend to RC just to make the dream more stable and to give some concrete evidence for myself that I am indeed dreaming. I had one dream where my hand was normal. I counted 5 fingers but I still believed that I was dreaming. I willed my hand to look weird and my fingers turned to liquid. So what you said about willing the RC to fail is actually a solid plan if you are in a dream. Using willpower works in non-lucid dreams just fine. I’ve heard that several people RC by trying to levitate or move objects. I became lucid by moving a carpet with my mind in one dream.
tl;dr Keep a high level of awareness and the RC isn’t as important. Once you see something weird in the dream and think that you are dreaming, it’s fairly easy to will weirdness to happen.
You need to start doing mental reality checks, those are simple questions like: where am I, how did I get here, what am I doing and so on, easy questions to ask but hard to answer if you are in a dream and look at physical RC as something achievable. Next time when you’re doing RC tell yourself I’m gonna see six fingers, or I’m going to breath through closed nose and when you are done doing that no matter the result ask yourself critical questions/mental RC.
And what Letaali said about keeping high awareness, it’s a way of doing things consciously, it requires a lot of practice, patience and time but it’s very rewarding…
thank you guys for your advice! you’ve all been very helpful, and given me something to think about.
you’re right in telling me to keep a high awareness. i have a bit of a track record of poor situational awareness. i tend to accept everything around me as it stands, and that might be part of the reason achieving lucidity is so damn hard for me.
hopefully next time i see duplicate cats or strange furniture, i’ll notice it quicker. maybe then i might start getting sharper. really, though, thanks everyone!
(also, really good to know that the willpower trick has some merit.)
As suggested do RC when something just slightly odd happens, it doesn’t have to be something you see only once a year odd kind of thing but little, simple things because that will prevent you doing RC as a robot + it will bring randomness into procedure, because if you do RC every 15 minutes as I see dreamers do then it all becomes a routine just like everything else we do in life and that is a killer for a achieving LDs. So don’t feel like you need to do a 100 RCs daily, it’s more about when you do it then how much and how you do it. Like I said before only asking yourself critical questions is more then enough but only if you do it properly…