How to make reality checks more effective

Hi, recently I decided to start doing reality checks and a week in, I'm having a hard time being genuine.
Whenever I do a reality check, I feel as if I'm simply doing the act without feeling any genuine use of it. Whenever reading about reality checks, one of the biggest tips is to really ask yourself if you are dreaming when performing a reality check, but the issue is, is that I don't really feel the need to ask myself or reassure my reality. Whenever I begin a reality check, I ask myself if I'm dreaming and I'm instantly smacked with the thought of "of course I'm not dreaming, come on!" and it just kind of ruins it for me because I know past that point I can't be genuine. Well, then I just plug my fingers into my palm anyways.

Are there any tips that others who have had this same issue can share?

Thank you!

Your supposed to imagine you're dreaming. Use your imagination! By doing reality checks during the day, you're rehearsing for the dream world, that way you're prepared when the time comes. Rehearsing reality checks is like rehearsing for anything else.

The best time to practice reality checks is as soon as possible upon regaining consciousness during sleep. That way, there is a chance you might be dreaming because of the possibility of regaining consciousness during a dream.

Dolphin's advice is solid!

If you're having trouble wrapping your mind around it though, find a way to make it more interesting and entertaining for yourself. Do the reality check, and when you're done, imagine what you would do right then if it were actually a dream. Or what I do is attempt to move something with my mind, just in case.

It helps to have a lot of non-lucid dreams in your dream journal. Build your dream awareness (the awareness of the fact that you do dream, a lot, every night). Once you experience several hundred or thousand non-lucid dreams which are vivid & present (you feel like you're really there), or when you start getting lucid and can't believe that you weren't actually awake this whole time, this feeling of "duh, of course I'm awake!" when doing RCs will go away. You'll realize that *at any conscious moment*, you could in fact be in the dream state!

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

It helps to have a lot of non-lucid dreams in your dream journal. Build your dream awareness (the awareness of the fact that you do dream, a lot, every night). Once you experience several hundred or thousand non-lucid dreams which are vivid & present (you feel like you're really there), or when you start getting lucid and can't believe that you weren't actually awake this whole time, this feeling of "duh, of course I'm awake!" when doing RCs will go away. You'll realize that *at any conscious moment*, you could in fact be in the dream state!

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FryingMan's first point gives you an idea of how many countless experiences you have dreaming where you have absolutely no suspicion that you are dreaming. You basically assumed that all of those non-lucid dreams weren't dreams either. His 2nd point comes with experience or at least having one vivid, present lucid dream that you will never forget...basically where you are sitting there in absolute shock that you are dreaming, thinking to yourself "that felt 100% like waking life...no f'ing way!!!" Recall that moment when you do your RC's.

You can also simulate an RC showing that you are dreaming and then really get excited thinking about all the fun things that you have planned when lucid. One that I liked to do a while back was standing in a room with a normal ceiling height: look up at ceiling and do a float RC lifting up on your toes and you will feel yourself getting closer to the ceiling which is somewhat more convincing than normal RC's...so the excitement and genuineness of the RC ramps up. In a real dream you will probably keep floating up off of the ground, but you should always have a few other RC's in your back pocket in waking and dreaming, just in case you don't float. So again, when doing it in waking life simulate that it is working and imagine the wonderful playground in front of you and reserve the remaining RC's for after this imagination runs it's course. In a dream, you will already be off to the races one way or another in almost all cases whether it is after actually floating or by way of the things you notice happening when you are running the imagination "program" through your head and you always have the remaining RC's just in case.

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Originally Posted by fogelbise

having one vivid, present lucid dream that you will never forget...basically where you are sitting there in absolute shock that you are dreaming, thinking to yourself "that felt 100% like waking life...no f'ing way!!!" Recall that moment when you do your RC's.

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Great advice. I'm going to incorporate this into my routine. Bringing that memory up will definitely sharpen my skepticism.

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Originally Posted by fogelbise

having one vivid, present lucid dream that you will never forget...basically where you are sitting there in absolute shock that you are dreaming, thinking to yourself "that felt 100% like waking life...no f'ing way!!!" Recall that moment when you do your RC's.

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With me, it's almost *every* single LD except for very very low awareness ones, bordering on semi-lucid. I just can't get over that feeling of "coming to" in a dream and realizing this entire preceding experience was all in the dream state. Exactly like you said it, fogelbise, it's like, "no f'ing way!".

Both my 1st and 2nd LDs were several minutes into long, detailed, vivid/present non-lucids. In my 2nd LD, I couldn't pick up some cards that I'd dropped, they kept slipping through my fingers. I thought to myself, "Oh, haha, this is one of those times where you should check to see if you're…… DREAMING! AAAAHHH! OMG!" No RC needed, I "stood bolt upright" with "widely open eyes" in absolute amazement that everything that came before was a dream.

It just doesn't get boring, ever.

Yep, those “Wait, this is a dream? Are you kidding?!” experiences aren't uncommon in my LDs. It doesn't take very many of those to permanently be able to do every RC with a genuine questioning of your state, no matter what the situation looks like. ;)

@FryingMan @Travis E. - It must be something different about the way we typically become lucid and this could be something we could dig into further to increase all of our frequency. I would say most of my lucid dreams are DILDs coming from a specific or general dream sign that is *not* present in the waking world, so it is not as much of a surprise that I was dreaming all along. The specific dream I was thinking of was such an ordinary, waking life situation that I won't ever forget the astonishment of that RC whereas most of my RC's in an LD are just confirming what I already know. Sageous must have a different experience from yours or mine as well since I think he says that he has never (or almost never?) gotten lucid doing an RC, he already knows if he chooses to do one.

I guess not every single LD has that amazement for me, sometimes it's "oh, yeah, this is totally a dream" after a dream-like thing happens. But a large number of them do have that amazement. A lot of my dreams are very waking-world like most of the time, so I have that "man, you mean this was a *dream* this whole time!?" flavor to them.

Actually, my experiences are much like Sageous's: By the time I do a RC, I'm normally already at least suspecting that I could be dreaming. A lot of my dream signs are the sorts of things that could plausibly happen in waking life, but not with high likelihood, so discovering I'm dreaming can still come as a surprise, at least briefly. Though by now, I'm usually not too terribly surprised, just perhaps a bit startled for an instant—I've gotten pretty used to the feeling. ;)

Then there are dreams in which I seem to very gently realize I'm dreaming without a specific “Aha!” moment, in such a gradual and subtle manner that I practically don't even realize it's happened. (Usually it will seemingly happen spontaneously without any RCs involved at all, even for confirmation.) I'll just sort of smoothly transition from nonlucidity to my LD mindset without any surprise or hesitation at all, which actually seems sort of strange in a way.

I almost never do a reflex RC and suddenly discover I'm dreaming: budding lucidity comes first, before the RC, almost always. But nonetheless, it is still amazing to me to find myself in the dream state, having not realized it beforehand.