Strangely enough I've been a bit out of interest with lucid dreaming lately and have not felt much particular pull towards DV as a result. Although my mind hasn't much interest in lucidity right now, maybe because I am feeling more interested in non-lucid stuff anyway, this and your other supporting post are pulling my interest back in, a bit. I won't go on about this since that's best left for the rant/rave thread. 
And reading your post has made me feel I should re-read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, it has been a while since I last read all the way through it.
Personally, as years have gone by since I first started to learn about lucid dreaming, I have started to distance myself from the notions of "Not realizing one is dreaming" or "Not realizing the dream is not real", mostly because these thoughts (to me) invalidate the very real and valid experience of dreaming as a whole, lucid or not.
To me, this seems to come as a sound conclusion to what we have known all along about how we experience reality, that it is all "In" on some level. Interestingly, I recently watched a film that touched on the concept of Phenomenology. Though I have been aware of the concept for many years now, I did not realise it had a formal name until I was reading about the film. Incidentally, the film was Dark Star (1974), nothing to write home about for most people but I appreciated it.
I wish I had a reliable source for this but I remember being told that a lot of what we "sense" is information that is guessed (filled in) by the brain, rather than actually sensed and processed. Humans, and animals in general maybe, do a lot of guesswork in day-to-day activity to judge whether or not something is a "good idea" and generally there always seems to be the possibility of gaps of information when it comes to both the senses and to communication, otherwise misunderstandings and accidents probably wouldn't happen at all...
At any point in our lives, there is always some relevance to those questions about whether or not we are being deceived by our senses and present experience. After all, many (probably most of us here at least, I'd wager) have had the experience of dreaming something that was so engaging or lifelike that we feel amazed, stupid or confused when we actually wake up, to find that the experience was "simply" internal. My personal opinion has been for some time, that it is a mistake to minimise these events as "simply" internal, because as I have lived on, I have personally felt that the dream world is just as important as waking life in many respects, even if it's often harder to recall what happened in the dream world.
I think that avoiding an aspect of duality is a good idea in this respect, precisely because it takes not only reasoning but some kind of intuition too, to make an assessment on our present situation and what surrounds us. Reasoning and logic can be flawed, be we awake or dreaming, for any number of reasons, though I'd guess that distraction is at least one reason that is common to both worlds and then there are reasons such as impaired ability to think clearly, because of substances in waking life or because of an unknown factor (certainly at the time, to the dreamer) whilst dreaming. In my view, the other aspect of it is that logic is not necessarily the "truth" or factual in a sense of unchanging, otherwise we wouldn't speak of fallacies and we wouldn't have changes of heart on matters that are supposedly of intellect and reason, I think.
So to me, the assumption that we should judge something regarding its "In-Out" factor based on its current presentation to us, rather than what we have known of it from past experience alone, seems sound. Of course, intuition is far from flawless too and so we end up with scenarios where we are often making our "best guess" about something anyway.
I think your exercise is interesting and worth considering, because it goes beyond recognising something as "thought" and thus internal, but also goes into recognising another important factor. That factor is why for example, I often fail with reality checks while dreaming, because I don't go into analysing the immediacy of context, both internal and external, something which your exercise promotes.
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