Thread: I always forget to do RCs during the day

If it was easy we would be doing it in our dreams without any effort and becoming lucid every night!

I think it comes down to commitment and desire. If you really want to do it you will remember eventually and start to make a habit of it, you just have to keep trying.

I often suddenly realise that I haven't RC'd for half the day and kick myself.

Depending on what dream signs you spot frequently in your dreams, you could use those as an excuse to reality check whenever you see them in real life (IF you can see them in real life, barring dream logic). That's one way I end up doing that very same RC often throughout the day (mainly because one of my dream signs pops up in my life frequently). You could also write down or set some sort of reminder that you know you'll see throughout the day. For example, maybe on a piece of paper, write something like 'Are you dreaming?' or 'It's time to reality check'. Stick that paper in a place you know you'll pass by multiple times. Helps if it's easy to forget. Eventually the habit will grow even bigger. Hope this helps.

Don't have any dream signs. Only a few which only recur once in a month or so. I already do these RCs.
And I'm afraid that relying on a reminder to RC won't work because you won't have those reminders in your dreams.

I wouldn't rely on it so much as just have it as a boost for remembering to do so. Even if the reminders themselves don't appear in the dream, the habit sticks. In any case, keep at it, and don't stop keeping at it. First and foremost that's always what's important.

I would try two things:

1. Keep a journal, telling yourself to RC at least 20 times in a day. Make them good RCs (with awareness) and make a note of how often you meet your goal. I wouldn't suggest more than this, though you can if you want.
2. Keep an alarm on your phone that will remind you to RC. There are some apps that can do this.

Concerning "not having the reminder in dreams," how do you know? You may dream about being buzzed by the alarm. It's not unheard of! And besides, being reminded to RC and then doing it is a lot better than not doing any RCs at all.

You can extend your inventory of reality checks, like everytime you read something or check your clock/smartphone, ask yourself "am I dreaming" and see if the text is consistent or not. Everytime you go to the toilet you can do the check with your nose or other weird things (I never read it around but the penis can look weird or even have two in a dream ). Then you wash your hands and you are in front of a mirror -> "am I dreaming?" mirrors do weird things in the dream. You turn on the light: "am I dreaming"? Lights don't work very well in the dream. etc etc

Originally Posted by DeDromer

You can extend your inventory of reality checks, like everytime you read something or check your clock/smartphone, ask yourself "am I dreaming" and see if the text is consistent or not. Everytime you go to the toilet you can do the check with your nose or other weird things (I never read it around but the penis can look weird or even have two in a dream ). Then you wash your hands and you are in front of a mirror -> "am I dreaming?" mirrors do weird things in the dream. You turn on the light: "am I dreaming"? Lights don't work very well in the dream. etc etc

I can read text perfectly in dreams and I very rarely come across text before I'm lucid in my dreams anyways. Lights sometimes don't work well for me in dreams, but as with text I rarely flick on light switches before I'm lucid in my dreams. Never have come across mirrors in my dreams yet. I think I should slap myself every time I realize I forgot to do an RC
Was just hoping for someone to come up with some tricks to help turn this into a habit more easily.

The plugged nose RC is one of the best ones. I remember when I first heard about lucid dreaming I thought I would try the RC's but it seemed impossible. Here is some advice. RC's wont get you lucid. You might think that if you do them when you are awake, you'll do them when you are asleep, but this is very rare.

If you want consistent lucid dreams you need to work on your awareness. The reason that you keep forgetting to do RC's is because you are not aware in your daily life. It's something I'm working on too.

I use the plugged nose RC. And you say RC's won't get you lucid... but if I were to do a plugged nose RC out of habit in my dream then I would instantly get lucid! It just has to turn into a habit first.

Yes but you would have to do it many many times. To do that you need extremely high awareness, or you'd forget, or only remember to do it once every few hours.

Just being more mindful of everyday life is more effective. I just use RC to confirm I'm dreaming. Using it to become lucid isn't very effective I think. You'll get lucid, but I don't think very often

^^ That.

Originally Posted by MemeViews

I use the plugged nose RC. And you say RC's won't get you lucid... but if I were to do a plugged nose RC out of habit in my dream then I would instantly get lucid! It just has to turn into a habit first.

Sadly, and contrary to the popular internet mythology, it does not work that way. State tests (RC's) are not meant make to make you lucid; they are meant to confirm that you are dreaming, or not.

RC's are meant to do two things:

First (and foremost), RC's confirm that you are not dreaming: They are state tests that you do when you have a feeling you might be dreaming, or perhaps have seen a dreamsign that indicates you could be in a dream. These confirmations are done primarily during waking-life, are done after you sincerely ask yourself the question, "Is this a dream?" and are always done after you have decided to question your state; not before. Keep in mind that LaBerge called them Reality Checks, and not Dream checks; the difference is significant.

The second role of RC's is to help you to initiate a moment during waking-life when you can do things like imagine everything around you being a dream, or perhaps pay attention to your presence in the moment (aka, thinking lucidly). Those moments are very helpful, when taken often and sincerely, toward building a lucid mindset that may follow you into your dream and cause you to wonder, during the dream, if you are dreaming -- and then do a RC to confirm it!

What RC's do not do is make you lucid on their own; that is not their purpose. If you make a habit of doing RC's during the day, and do them often, sure, you will likely do RC's during dreams thanks to day residue, and one of two things will likely happen: You will either (non-lucidly) do your RC and it will fail, confirming to your DC You that you are awake; or -- thanks to your dreaming mind obligingly fulfilling your expectation -- your RC will "work" (i.e., you'll still be breathing with your nose plugged), and you will then have a NLD about being lucid, perhaps filled with lots of stuff you hope to do when lucid, but all without the real presence of your waking-life Self.

I think the rise of the mythology that RC's make you lucid is based on the possibility that dreamers forget that they were already lucid when they decided to do a RC in a dream. This sort of makes sense, because the suspicion that "this might be a dream," is far less powerful than the "Ah-Ha!" moment that follows a successful RC, and so the Ah-Ha moment shoves the original suspicion from memory.

A couple of less important notes: First, habits are not always good things. If doing RC's becomes a habit for you, then you risk allowing them to be a function that you do by rote (like brushing your teeth), and you will give them very little thought as you're doing them. I think it is much better to have each RC be important to you as you do it, and to avoid letting them become a habit. Also, if anecdotally, I have had thousands of DILDs over the years, and I'm pretty sure I have never become lucid by doing a RC. Try to keep your RC's sincere and fresh, and they will be a much better tool for you than simply doing them habitually.

I guess the bottom line here is that you really must already suspect you are dreaming in order for a RC to work during a dream; and by work I mean it is confirming that you are dreaming, and lucid; it is not making you lucid on its own. This, when combined with their role in daywork, still makes RC's a powerful tool for lucidity, but in a different way than seems to be their popularly, if incorrectly, accepted role these days.

tl;dr: RC's don't make you lucid; they confirm your lucidity. You must already suspect you are dreaming in order for a RC to work. If you do RC's with the expectation that they alone will make you lucid, then you will probably not become lucid.

If RCs are a habit by rote, then ok you're right, very little thought is spent on them during waking life, but when I do an RC in my dream and it succeeds (i.e. it confirms that you are dreaming) then instantly I would realize that something is off. I realize that something is off so I immediately tried to do the RC again, and again... and with each subsequent RC I would more and more affirm to myself that I am in fact dreaming. And always as soon as I realize that I'm dreaming I try to engage my senses, feel the texture on the walls, feel the ground below my feet, smell the air, and look for details in the room/scenery and other grounding excercies. The point is, I had a lucid dream before where I became lucid after doing a random RC, because I instantly notice something is off. And one thing leads to another. I would never ignore an RC that just succeeded.

So I think that I will start having a lot of DILDs once I get this habit down.

^^ Well, okay then; Never mind.

Good luck!

I’ll chime in as I’m actually trying out something similar, of trying to develop a habit of RCing to everyday cues that have a good chance of also being present in a dream (like indoor/outdoor transitions). I’ve been doing it for a long time and it’s quite difficult, but I’m determined to stick with it.

The way I see it, I need a reminder to check if I’m dreaming, because even though I may have the self-awareness level to potentially know it is a dream, I most likely won’t be interested in checking or realizing it, if I’m caught up in the dream narrative.

^ This is the main reason I’m doing this.

If this was a sure-fire technique, my advice would be to just keep it up. Habit formation takes quite a while (I’ve been doing this for 4 months and still nowhere close) and it will eventually sink in if you keep it up long enough. However a big part of this working, I guess, is the awareness you put into the reality checks and their quality. However I have been concerned about reality checks being used "responsively" with something like this, as opposed to making them significant...

Therefore, Sageous, whilst you’re here (and having read your post earlier), I wonder if I could offer you an opinon...

Originally Posted by Sageous

A couple of less important notes: First, habits are not always good things. If doing RC's becomes a habit for you, then you risk allowing them to be a function that you do by rote (like brushing your teeth), and you will give them very little thought as you're doing them. I think it is much better to have each RC be important to you as you do it, and to avoid letting them become a habit. Also, if anecdotally, I have had thousands of DILDs over the years, and I'm pretty sure I have never become lucid by doing a RC. Try to keep your RC's sincere and fresh, and they will be a much better tool for you than simply doing them habitually.

On the note of RCs becoming “habitual”: I did worry about the idea of RCs being too habitual with reacting to cues or reminders, but I think that RCs themselves would not become habitual or mindless unless the dreamer chose to do them like that. I think what you CAN make habitual is the “prompting” to do one, much like when you get to a junction or a roundabout when driving, and you instinctively think to use your indicator, or adjust light brightness for oncoming traffic. I think a prompting can also leave room for conscious thought (e.g. “is this a time I should indicate?”). That prompting came out of nowhere from years of habit building, and even encouraged them to make a conscious decision depending on the context, and often perhaps from the midst of random thought or distraction. That was just an example, but with the prompting to do a RC from a cue, I assume then you could still consciously do one properly, as long as you were interested (which would be clear from your intention to lucid dream in the first place). I’m no expert but this is just my thinking on the matter.

Originally Posted by Eamo24

Therefore, Sageous, whilst you’re here (and having read your post earlier), I wonder if I could offer you an opinon...

On the note of RCs becoming “habitual”: I did worry about the idea of RCs being too habitual with reacting to cues or reminders, but I think that RCs themselves would not become habitual or mindless unless the dreamer chose to do them like that. I think what you CAN make habitual is the “prompting” to do one, much like when you get to a junction or a roundabout when driving, and you instinctively think to use your indicator, or adjust light brightness for oncoming traffic. I think a prompting can also leave room for conscious thought (e.g. “is this a time I should indicate?”). That prompting came out of nowhere from years of habit building, and even encouraged them to make a conscious decision depending on the context, and often perhaps from the midst of random thought or distraction. That was just an example, but with the prompting to do a RC from a cue, I assume then you could still consciously do one properly, as long as you were interested (which would be clear from your intention to lucid dream in the first place). I’m no expert but this is just my thinking on the matter.

Yes, if you can develop a habit of remembering to RC, and still are able to do sincere RC's after you remember to do them (as you describe), then sure, you're doing a good thing. I would, and have, certainly recommend that process.

That said, I still believe that a habit to remember to RC, followed by a sincere RC, might not be the path normally followed by many dreamers. Instead, they simply get in the habit of, say, poking their palm, until they reach a point where every now and then they are simply poking their palm without giving it much thought at all, much less sincerely asking if they are in a dream. That kind of habit is not a good thing, because it will do nothing to help get your head in the right place for LD'ing...and that's what I was talking about.

I think my problem with habits is that habitual processes exist in the realm of autopilot, consciously speaking, and on autopilot is not where you want to be when you do a RC, because autopilot is a non-lucid state of mind. A habit of doing RC's (as opposed to a habit of remembering to RC, of course!) will only produce a bunch of mindless actions, and sure, these actions will likely appear as day residue in a dream, but they will just as likely not make you lucid. Again, a RC done in a NLD without any self-awareness present (or without the dreamer already having a suspicion he is dreaming) will very likely fail, thus convincing your dreaming self that you are awake; that, or it will work, and you might then non-lucidly dream that you are lucid, just like you wanted to be... but I won't go back into that!

I once dreamed that I was dreaming, discovering that I was dreaming and became lucid... In the second dream. That means: I dreamed to become lucid but I was not lucid. Blah.