Practicing REALITY CHECKS as a primary method?

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Originally Posted by midnightfire

But I have had a few times where I have been in the dream, trying my hardest to push my fingers through my hand and it didn't work. The last time was really weird as I was quite sure it was a dream, but I couldn't get my fingers through my hand so I had to conclude it wasn't a dream!!

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I sometimes have problems with RCs like that, but with experience I've gotten to the point where, if I really feel like I must be dreaming but the RC doesn't want to tell me so, I just keep trying or do other RCs or look around for other oddities until I do prove to myself I'm dreaming. Often, since I usually fly in dreams anyway, I just attempt to fly/float/hover, and that quickly settles it. I think I'm starting to realize that when I'm really that convinced I'm dreaming already, I'm probably needlessly wasting time trying to prove it to myself. :P

That happens to me too. I've done the light switch check and it worked fine in my dream! I suppose this is why some say you must do several checks. The one that always works for me is to check some words or phrases to see if they change. They always change. So I pretty much focus on this during the day. I do dream more now about seeing wording in various places. So now all I have to do is remember to check it.

As CoffinCakes said, it's important to remember that everyone's dreams work a little differently. What's "most effective" for you might not be the most effective RC for me.

For myself, I tend to use a combination of the counting-my-fingers RC and journalling to improve recall. That works well enough to get me a few LDs a week.