Why should you do RCs when you know you're awake?

Is it so I’m more likely to do one in a dream, so I can become lucid easier?

Yes, it is to make it a habit. :cool: I have been doing RC as a habit before going to bed for a long time, and it took months before it got into my dreams.

Welcome, btw! There is an introduction topic in “The Gathering” if you want to introduce yourself to the rest of us. Good luck and sweet dreams! :cool:

it seems pointless to do them when you are so confident that you are dreaming… but you have to realize that your gonna be just as confident most of the time while dreaming that you aren’t really dreaming. you have to really imagine that dreaming is a possibility at the moment your doing your RC… to ensure your really curious about reality.

if you make it too much of a habit you might do it in a dream and still not notice your dreaming (you might not count your fingers carefully enough or something of that nature). it’s important to really question reality when you do it, so you thouroughly investigate it when you actually are dreaming

I also questioned RCs in the beginning because I said hey, there are other things I do every day IRL that I don’t do in my dreams, like brushing my teeth. But then I came to the realization that it should work because lucid dreaming is something I want to do while I’m asleep (as opposed to tooth brushing) and I’ve noticed things creeping into my dreams, like if I want to use looking into a mirror as a RC, I have started noticing mirrors in my dreams but they haven’t yet made me lucid, but some day I hope they will! (My goal being to walk through a mirror and see what’s on the other side.) Like siiw said, it took her months before her RCs got into her dreams, so be patient, I know I am.

Interesting note: The one LD I had so far though, wasn’t really sparked by a RC, I just knew I was dreaming somehow because I was having a nightmare, in other words, my critical faculty was activated (see page 60 of EWLD).

In more than one LD I’ve had I was 100% sure I was awake. I told myself that if I wanted RCs to appear in my dreams, I’d have to do one even if everything looked perfectly normal. Ended up doing one reluctantly while thinking that exact thought, and I found that I was actually asleep. :cool:

Welcome btw! :wave:

You can never be completely sure that you’re awake and not dreaming.

Trust me - I’ve taken a RC to try and get into the habbit of it. I was completely sure that I was awake.
And yeah - it turned out I wasn’t awake after all :wink:.

First of all, welcome Annylei

If you cant question the reality in real life I doubt that you are able to do the same in a dream. Reality checks help you to question the reality, and in order to be able to do RC’s in dreams you need to do them IRL too.

When you do RC’s when your awake, you kinda store the information to your subconscious. You make it a habit sort of.
And when your dreaming, your subconscious tells you to do RC

And again, sry my bad english :tongue:

How do you speak of reality ??? Even with RC’s you cannot be sure you are in real life… you can never be sure… don’t ask me why… just think a little…

Sharki: You might not be sure you are IRL, but you can be sure you are dreaming if something abnormal happens, like breathing underwater (unassisted), flying (also unassisted), or any number of things that are impossible IRL. A good way to know you are awake is if you pinch your nose shut with your fingers, close your mouth, and see if you can breathe…there is no way you can breathe with your airways closed IRL (this RC will always prove you are in real life).

I think I know what you are saying, that RC’s can fool you (a false-positive), like maybe you expect to not be able to breathe through your pinched-shut nose, so even in a dream you might think you’re awake if you can’t breathe. But your comment was about being sure you are in real life, not dreaming…the nose RC will always work to prove you are in reality if you are awake, even if it doesn’t always work in dreams. And that is why you should use many RC’s so that if you are dreaming, one of them should eventually fail (or work, if you’re awake).

Can you count RC:

  1. nose
  2. hands
  3. digital watch - look twice
  4. any text - look twice

anyone

Ah no… what I’m saying is that how do you know this is real life ??

Maybe I’m just some strange entity of somebody’s dreams… even yours… And when you wake up your life will be completely different… And it will seem like it lasted a few minutes…

Maybe we are all entitys of somebody elses dream… of a videogame… Who knows ? Maybe every dream we have, we create a life just like this one lasting for so long…

Maybe… this is actually the matrix and the waschowski (sp?) were actually trying to show us the truth but we all decided that it was fictional…

How can you even know if we haven’t started existing just today ?? The only thing telling us we didn’t is memory… and we COULD easily create our own past… or the person who is dreaming us…

Well said!
It`s a bit scary , though! :cool:

For that matter, maybe our entire universe as we know it is all contained within a single cell of an even bigger being, who knows…you can discuss that stuff in the Philosopher’s Cloud section of the forum:
ld4all.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31

I thought we were talking about RC’s as related to LD’s, not RC’s as related to “what is reality?”. :wink:

Did we? :tongue:

I think it is possible to be 100% sure when you’re in reality (or at least what we perceive as reality) as opposed to a dream. What about, say, when you’re at school, learning something completely new? How would you learn that stuff in a dream?

And reality is all relative anyway, even if reality as we know it is like the Matrix, it’s all still our mind model of what goes on around us.

From dictionary.com:

reality

n 1: all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you; “his world was shattered”; “we live in different worlds”; “for them demons were as much a part of reality as trees were” [syn: world] 2: the state of being actual or real; “the reality of his situation slowly dawned on him” [syn: realness, realism] [ant: unreality] 3: the state of the world as it really is rather than as you might want it to be; “businessmen have to face harsh realities” 4: the quality possessed by something that is real [ant: unreality]

Yhats right , but in dreams are you most of the time thinking that its real. So if this had been a dream would I anyway have thougt that this wasnt a dream .
If you isn`t lucid then…
Thats why RCs .

My dreamsigns seem to be my friends most of the time
this can cause some problems because i would look odd if i plugged my nose and tried to breath every time i saw a friend :tongue: :peek: :content:

And if you look at your digital watch, they’ll think you’re boring when you are with them! :happy:

You can try to stretch your finger, look at your hands or try to find something written in the surroundings, and look at it twice.

If you are that worried about doing RC’s, you can always drop $699 for the NovaDreamer :wink: :
americanbilling.com/luciddream_c … eamer.html

Sheesh, I thought $450 was high when the Lucidity Institute was selling it; now this is the only distributor of it and the price is sooo high!!
lucidity.com/distributor.html