Thread: Skipping Reality Checks because the dream felt "too realistic"

I felt like I should share my last night's experience with novice lucid dreamers, who might feel like it is pointless to perform Reality Checks in waking life when you "know" that you are awake, just because everything "feels" like waking life.
This dream was quite interesting, it started out with me being on a clear-cut area in a forest where I was supposed to plant trees (not sure how common this kind of summer job is in other parts of the world, but basically you are with a team and you stay at a bunch of locations and plant a crapload of trees all day), and then I noticed to my dismay that I had lost or forgotten almost all my equipment and belongings - I had no water bottles and no working equipment, and I had got lost for some reason.
Of course, this caused a lot of stress to me, and I wished I could be somewhere else and get away from all the mess - and all of a sudden I was in a house I used to live in two years ago - so basically I got three dreamsigns at the same time: the unusually stressful situation, the teleporting to another place, and the fact that the place happened to be a house that I don't even live in anymore.
At this point I started to feel very bizarre, it's hard to explain but it felt sort of like I was losing grip of the whole dreamworld, and tried to hold tight to it and stay in it;
almost like the kind of concentration you have when you try to stay awake while being extremely sleepy.
And suddenly I started to have thoughts like "what's going on here? I don't trust my current state at all, there is something weird about all this - could it possibly be a dream...? but everything looks so realistic...! it must be waking life...!".
So I lost an excellent opportunity to become lucid right there, only because the dream felt almost exactly as vivid as waking life - although I don't see this as a failure, on the contrary I see it as a very great success in my quest to start having lucid dreams again, which was about five months ago (I haven't bothered much with lucid dreaming in a while, though)
Anyway, this is exactly why it is worth to take Reality Checks seriously - especially when you have just woken up in the morning.
There is always the chance that you might be dreaming if you ever find yourself in a groggy "autopilot" state in everyday life, and it's best to double-check just to make sure, because dreams can be treacherously vivid and convincing.