Thread: This makes no sense

Of course it's possible. Actually it makes complete sense :p If you do something so much then you are doing it in a mechanical way, without thinking about it, not being aware enough while you are doing it. I think the way this works is you do it so much, that it becomes something uninteresting in your life, hence you don't dream about it. For example most of my time I spend it on the computer, but I almost never use a computer in my dreams. Also, belief plays a huge role in LDing if you believe that you will not LD because you did too many RCs , then you will not LD.

I'd say cut down a bit on the RC's, maybe five a day, once every 2 hours(it's up to you, but this is what I read works for most people). Also, make sure you are aware of everything around you while you are doing it and make sure you don't even think "there's no way this is a dream". Act like you are probably in one and question everything.

Great response by rafaelinio. To expand on things a little bit more, I think the concept of RCs and their application to lucid dreaming, the benefits of using them, and the possible downsides of using them incorrectly needs to be discussed, maybe I'll start a thread to get more in depth with it, but I'll try to keep my opinion on them short.

I don't know if this is true, but I think a common misconception new LDers have is to misjudge or misunderstand what exactly the RCs are meant to be doing, which can lead them to use them in ways they either weren't intended for and don't work, or may even hinder progress. One such misconception is that RCs themselves are a litmus test for knowing you're currently dreaming or not. When you do a reality check while awake, to some degree it's meant to establish the behavior as something you do often enough that, hopefully, it happens in a dream as well. However, it's less about the result of the reality check and about becoming aware of what you're doing at the moment, how you believe you got there, what other people there are and what they happen to be doing, what it feels like to be you at that moment, breathing and feeling the weight and pull of your clothes, how tense your muscles are, your body posture, etc. It's to get you to start taking notice of those things at a regular enough interval that it becomes habit, but not so regular that it's, as rafaelinio put it so well, " doing it in a mechanical way, without thinking about it". The reason it's so important to point out what you're actually doing during the RC is because simply looking around, asking if you're in a dream, and pinching your nose or poking your finger into your palm are things that don't require you to actually think about doing them. If you stop thinking about what you actually happen to be doing while you're RCing, why would you be thinking about the result of the test either? And for another thing, I've never had an RC get me lucid on its own, ever. They were always just a way of confirming if I was dreaming, and I realized that one didn't necessarily have to work for me to still be dreaming, because at that point I already know and acknowledge I'm dreaming.

In any case, the brain compartmentalizes everything, it's how you become more efficient at doing things without making as many time-wasting mistakes. What can wind up happening is that you follow a template of behaviors you associate with the concept of performing a reality check, and then thoughtlessly perform them. The point isn't to find out that you're dreaming so much as be used in conjunction with recognizing dream signs after analyzing what seems to show up repeatedly in a dream as a way to get you to momentarily stop thinking or doing everything you are in the middle of and rebuild the world from the ground up, like how you got there, what it feels like to be you, etc. These two things can then, hopefully, help you start realizing other patterns of behavior that you experience almost exclusively while dreaming or things that you do that for some reason help you get lucid... but that can only work if you use them that way specifically. Unfortunately though, the intent behind the process and why you do it exactly is rather ambiguous most places you look, so it's easy to wind up not really accomplishing much of anything by using them the wrong way.