Thread: Questioning Yourself

So I guess you never had a lucid dream? Really you don't RC until you are already lucid or you happen to do it by habit. Doing RC's during the day will eventually carry over to your dreams and hopefully trigger lucidity. Non lucid dreams can feel like you are just watching a movie but once you are lucid it becomes more real and more in the "now". There are plenty of strange things that will happen in waking life that will give you the opportunity to practice RCing. Just be persistent and don't give up. Keep a dream journal and build your dream recall. I promise it will happen eventually. Anyone can do it.

This mirrors what Xanous said somewhat or expands upon it. As I adviced someone else in a different thread, a powerful technique is to during waking life start looking for anything weird and out of the ordinary and do your reality checks whenever you see something that seems especially weird. This should happen a lot because once you stop and think about it: life is weird. Instead of doing other RCs you can at that point just mentally ask yourself questions such as: Is this weirder than I would expect in waking? Do I remember how I got here? And you must then seriously consider the answers to these questions, not just respond automatically with "no" or "yes".

If your life is not weird enough for you: spend a day in waking life imagining that you just came from another planet or another country or a different era or were a different gender or age group than you are, which things would seem particularly weird to you, and why. Then switch to thinking about it as yourself, do they still seem weird or not and why.

If you develop a habit of going through life like this, you will hopefully find that (a) you will develop better observation skills; and (b) develop a habit of questioning reality. These habits ultimately are bound to spill over into your dream life. It may take time. Be patient and persistent, and it will pay off. And even if it does not right away, hopefully your waking life will become more amusing for you in the meantime, which surely is a nice side benefit.

This may mirror what JoannaB and Xanous said somewhat or expands upon it.
Keeping a dreamjournal is really one of the most important things, not only to improve your recall/memory but also for collecting dreamsigns, you will enhance your ability to recognize such occurrences to become lucid. Dreamsigns aren't just weird behaviour of Dream Characters, weird shapes or finding objects in unusual places but can also be strong feelings or unusual thoughts.

So in your waking life, try not only to look out for weird occassions where you can do a reality check, but also try to make it a habit of your daily life to observe events that are similiar to your dreamsigns, for example if you often encounter weird behaviour in your dreams by other humans or animals, try to be aware of how they act in waking life, how they act and move, become familiar with them and more aware of them, it should then be easier for your brain to recognize their unusual behaviour in your dreams and remember that you're in fact dreaming, so that you can do a Reality Check to stabilize the dream/awareness that you're dreaming.

You may think that it is not necessary, but remember the part of your brain (Dreaming and the Prefrontal Cortex) that is responsible for logic and that stuff is not very active during non-lucid dreaming, it is asleep, but if you become more aware of the things, how they normally act and move in waking life, I think it will be easier for the for you to at least recognize that something is "wrong" even without the DLPFC being fully active or not at all, I am no expert on this but once that happens, the DLPFC will "start up" and you will become fully lucid.

Good luck for the future and nice dreams :-)