Using Reality Checks to Achieve Lucid Dreams
June 4th, 2007
This article is Part 8 in the series Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming.
In order to determine whether or not you are dreaming, it is necessary to develop a habit of performing frequent reality checks. A reality check simply involves asking yourself a question, such as "Am I dreaming?" or "Is this a dream?", and may also involve specific actions you can take to determine if you are awake or dreaming.
Because most of us are not in the habit of asking ourselves "Am I dreaming?" while in the midst of a dream, we must train ourselves to get into the habit of questioning our reality. By training yourself to regularly question your reality during waking life to determine whether or not you are dreaming, the habit will eventually carry over to your dreaming life and ultimately you will find yourself posing the question while dreaming. When that happens, you'll greatly increase the odds of realizing you are within a dream and thus increase the odds of achieving lucidity.
Asking yourself "Am I dreaming?" only whenever the thought occurs to you will not help you develop the habit. Instead, you must make a habit of remembering to perform reality checks at frequent intervals throughout the day. It may help to schedule your reality checks so they coincide with other events that typically occur multiple times during each day, such as every time you eat, every time you use the restroom, every time you walk in or out of your home, or even every time you walk through any doorway. If you make it a point to ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" whenever you perform specific activities, you will eventually develop a habit of questioning your reality several times each day.
A common method of scheduling reality checks involves setting the alarm on your wristwatch to sound every hour and performing your reality check whenever the alarm sounds. I don’t recommend this method because if it is the only prompt you use you’ll eventually begin to rely on the alarm as your sole trigger to perform a reality check. If you do that and then never hear an alarm within your dream, you’ll never be prompted to perform a reality check while dreaming. It is much more useful to incorporate a variety of separate prompts into your day so you are frequently reminded to perform your reality check without relying solely on one specific act or event to prompt you.
You should also begin to utilize your personal dream symbols as cues to perform reality checks. (Refer to the previous entry for methods to identify your own personal dream symbols.) After I examined my dream journal and discovered water was one of my personal dream symbols, I began to use water as my cue to perform reality checks throughout the day. Each time I encountered water in any form in waking life, I took note of it and asked myself if I was dreaming.
Review your dream journal to identify your own personal dream symbols and begin using them as prompts for reality checks throughout the day. By doing this, you'll condition yourself to perform a reality check whenever you encounter the dream symbol — an object or event you’ve already identified as a frequent participant in your dreams. Later, when you dream again of that particular dream symbol, your training will have prepared you to ask "Am I dreaming?", providing you with an ideal opportunity to recognize you are dreaming and subsequently achieve a conscious dreaming experience.
In most cases, asking yourself "Am I dreaming?" is not enough on its own. Your dreaming mind is almost always firmly convinced of the reality of the dream situation, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation may be. You may be sailing on a river of peanut butter while gazing at elephants with gossamer wings as they fly in figure-eights in the sky above you, yet — without performing specific techniques to prove to yourself you are dreaming — your dreaming mind will be convinced the situation is entirely real. For this reason, it is necessary not only to ask yourself if you are dreaming but also to take other very simple steps at the same time to determine whether or not you are within a dream. In my next article, I'll describe some of those steps in detail.
bill perry says:
This may sound a bit extreme, but I once thought it might be cool to get into the habit of performing reality checks whenever a specific word is heard or spoken.
Say the word is "Hot Dog". Each time I hear "Hot Dog", I could do a reality check. I don't know how long this would take to become an unconscious habit.
Imagine if your trigger word was the word "THE".
If the word was "The", then the result would be me doing reality checks 6 times just by reading comment!!!
So, especially if my subconscious mind took over, I'd have it made, since there would be no more conscious work on my part to do my reality checks.
Jun 5th, 2007 at 5:06 am
realityshifter says:
That's actually not a bad idea at all, though using a word like "the" or "and" would get a little too crazy for me to keep a handle on.
A common (but not painfully abundant) word like "day", "car", etc. might work well, or you could perform a reality check whenever you heard your own name.
The level of effectiveness also would depend on how much conversation occurs in your average dream. My dreams typically don't contain extensive dialogue. If I use spoken words as the trigger for a reality check, I probably would perform dozens of checks throughout the day but might not find myself performing as many checks while dreaming.
But for curiosity's sake, I may try the technique anyway just to experiment with whether or not it increases the amount of dialogue in my dreams. Devoting more awareness to a particular thing in my waking life usually increases the likelihood of it appearing in my dreams.
Jun 5th, 2007 at 5:32 pm