Moved from the First Steps to the Quest forum cause it’s the place where to discuss practical points of various LD’ing techniques
Hello all! I’m amazed at the reliability of the nose RC; it’s never failed me, and I’ve used it to achieve or confirm lucidity in 6 out of 7 LDs. I think this reliability is a result of the fact that we involuntarily breathe while we are asleep; plugging our dream nose doesn’t affect the breathing pattern, so we perceive ourselves to be breathing through our plugged nostrils in the dream. This is great, because it means that the nose RC will almost never fail. You certainly can’t get a false positive (be able to breathe in real life), and false negatives are almost impossible.
But this engenders a problem: when I do the nose RC in a dream, it often shifts my focus to my real-life breathing. This is, for obvious reason, problematic; it sometimes results in the end of the dream, although I can sometimes pull through this via palm-rubbing, etc.
Last night, I dreamed that I saw my deceased dog. I petted her and enjoyed seeing her again before realizing that I should do a reality check. The nose RC worked twice, and I became lucid. But this act directed my attention to my real-life breathing patterns, and I hovered between states of consciousness for a while–not awake, for I still had one foot in the dream, but not asleep, for I could faintly see my room around me. I tried spinning, which produced the dizzying sensations of spinning and even some sensations of my feet hitting the floor repeatedly, but I couldn’t see anything and the exercise was ultimately unsuccessful. I ended up losing the dream completely.
The most successful technique I’ve found for dealing with this (in my limited experience) is palm-rubbing. It can restore the dream back to a more vivid level for me. Too bad I didn’t try it last night.
Has anyone else had problems with this? How do you personally deal with it? Have I doomed your ability to use the nose RC by presenting this theory?
Thanks.