Quote Originally Posted by Tiktaalik View Post
I’ve been thinking a lot about RCs recently as well and have a bit of a love hate relationship with them. I’m still fairly new to Lucid dreaming and only started 3 months ago but I’ve managed to have 15 lucids in that time, 13 of these were DILDs.
I recently looked back at each one of them and compared the moment I became lucid. Some of them I had that spark of lucidity and instantly realised it was a dream and regained my full waking memory without any doubt. Other times I get that spark but I’m unsure whether it’s actually a dream and feel like I need to check and after checking that’s when I confirm and regain my waking memory. I was surprised to see there was a 50/50 split between the two experiences for me when I looked back and has me wondering why do we sometimes just know and other times we need that confirmation? Can anyone shed any light on this? Is it simply that in some dreams we have better awareness then others and other times we need that extra boost to convince us? I’m also wondering if theres a way to increase the lucids where we just know and avoid the RC confirmations which fail quite a lot for me, again maybe 50% of the time. If the answer to this is to work harder on daytime self awareness (which I’m working on) then my next question would be, does the need to RC within a dream lessen the more experienced you become? Thanks.
I think it is a matter of awareness. It's like a spectrum I imagine. Sometimes we become lucid from awareness alone. Sometimes we are not aware enough without the RC. However, once lucid, even from an RC, our awareness can increase very quickly. I had this happen the other night, lucidity level was very high, but it was an RC that caused my lucidity. Not awareness alone. Also, I don't think dream control and getting lucid from RCs are related, or at least, not strongly so. We can have excellent dream control from a lucid dream triggered by an RC.

To me, this is more than enough reason to practice RCs. Even though they are monotonous, and annoying, it's a mistake to dismiss them in favor of other "advanced" techniques. This very basic technique does work, and that's why LaBerge goes into it so much in Exploring... It works.