Need help with genuinely questioning reality when doing reality checks, and doing reality checks in a busy environment

Quest for Lucidity
1

I just can’t seem to convince myself that I could be in a dream during waking life when doing reality checks. When I do them, it feels like I’m just making myself do them to enforce the habit, but nothing more. I ask myself questions, such as “how do I know that I’m awake right now?” “where am I?” Etc, but I already know the answers. It never feels like GENUINE questioning, but more like I’m just doing them, hoping I’ll do them in a lucid dream, but it doesn’t happen.

I do finger through palm, counting fingers, and nose pinching as well throughout the day, but sometimes it just feels pointless when I’m not seeing any results, and when I genuinely KNOW that I’m awake.

When I first started my lucid dreaming journey, which was in December/January, I had much better progress and was actually getting lucid twice a week, and I could actually question wether or not I was in a dream while awake, but now that I’m a few months into my journey, the reality checks are losing effectiveness, because I’ve been asking myself these questions everyday for months, and it feels like I just always know when I’m awake now, and because of that, I haven’t had a lucid dream since March 1st, and that one wasn’t even 20 seconds long.

Because of this, I feel like my brain is feeling a LOT less mindful when doing them. Sometimes, I’ll just count my fingers, plan on doing another one like pinching my nose, but then I’ll instantly get distracted by something else, and it’s been this way for weeks now. I feel like my attention span is short with my reality checks now.

As for my next question, how do I do effective reality checks in public, such as at the store or at work, when I’m busy? I try to read and reread signs and ask myself questions, but I always feel more focused on my tasks than the checks…

I did so great at first, but now it’s just a mess.

2

Reality checks are mostly useless in this case. They confirm your suspicions that you’re lucid, not induce lucidity.

If our habits translated to dreamworld so easily, the dreamworld would be 1:1 copy of the waking world. It doesn’t happen. Whatever happens in waking world, stays in waking world. Of course, it sometimes can slip into the dreamworld, but I wouldn’t rely on the randomness.

You could train regions of your brain that relate to attention, awareness and critical thinking instead. Like questioning surroundings and asking yourself “does it look coherent“, “how did I end up here”, “does it make sense” etc. Google “all day awareness” or “sporadic awareness technique”.

I guess even if you train your brain to be more vigilant, performing some sleep interruption to activate brain more could be beneficial. Otherwise the regions that you trained to be more attentive will just casually shut off, and your training remain in the waking world.

I don’t do reality checks, don’t hunt for dreamsigns, yet randomly become lucid. Secret? Midnight insomnia and my attempts to calm it down just jack up prefrontal cortex activity. So it keeps heightened during the next REM period. No prospective memory training, reality checks, “when I will dream I’ll realise that I’m dreaming” etc. Apparently, just heightened PFC is often enough.