Hey Memm, I like your enthusiasm and wish you luck. Can't wait to see your progress and other experiments.

I also like this no-answers approach to Reality Checks. The first times I've played with this approach, I found the mystery... dull? "Am I dreaming?" Even without the explicit answer, I can half-hear the echo of knowing "no, I am awake" hidden behind the curtain of my willed ignorance. Isn't the refusal to answer such a simple question a game in self-deception? (I might be presuming too much here, though).

Since then, I have moved to including an in-out check, that is, I label things as coming from my my mind or from my environment (Daydreaming, anticipating, remembering: in. Things happening around me, things I am interacting with: out). This allows me to have different answers. It's not always "no, I am dreaming," sometimes it is "in, this scenario comes from my mind" (much like a dream, you see). I think this helps me engage more with the reality check.

But even the in-out check has an answer. No unresolved mystery. So my next thought on how to include such a thing in a reality check is of a more philosophical nature. What about using one of those questions that are intrinsically unanswerable. Questions of life and spirit. The hard question of consciousness. "How is my consciousness bound to this material world?" We have reflected on this forever and there is no satisfying answer yet. Objectively, consciousness can only be an inconsequential symptom of the material world. Yet, subjectively, we are inspired otherwise. And I think there is power in that feeling. In dreams and sleep, our conscious experience is decoupled from our body, from the material world and from society. We only remain tethered to our psychology. We are more naked than ever, and from there, waking life may seem like a dream: not so necessary/permanent to support the most intimate part of us. We still are us without it all.

Now, I'm writing ideas as they come to me, but the general point I want to make is to direct your attention to something like dream yoga, where the practitioner learns to perceive reality as a dream. I only have a vague everchanging perspective of this practice. I have criticized this approach a few times here in the past, but I can glean some value here, especially in the context of that truism you want to explore. I wonder if "is waking life a dream?" wouldn't be the more appropriate question for an engaging unanswerable mystery.

The way I mean it, "Is waking life a dream" is equivalent to "How is my consciousness bound to the material world." Both questions shift perspective from the material self to the immaterial consciousness, while being unanswerable and engaging questions. What I mean is that the question "Is waking life a dream?" does not seek to deny the reality of our lives or ridicule our engagement in waking life. It's about entering a state of non-duality, where the "I" becomes naked of its body and circumstances. The self becomes third person.

And so what? I'm not sure. It's just an interesting unanswerable question that results in a powerful state fertile for lucidity.