How familiar are you with your own dreams? Have you recalled a good amount and got a feel for how your dreams behave and play out? This is important because when you become more familiar with what your dreams look like you can better recognise when you’re having one. The more dream signs and recurring themes you can identify the more trained your detective mind will be at spotting dreamlike subtleties in dreams and waking life to RC to.

When you do an RC ignore that voice that says “nah, I’m awake” it’s not evidence. Look around and reflect on your current situation and like a detective, gather evidence that identifies it is or isn’t a dream. It doesn’t have to be something obvious like a Dinosaur is in your kitchen, it can be as subtle as your coffee mug isn’t where you thought you’d left it, or you can’t quite remember what you were just doing. Those are dream signs. If it’s not enough to convince you you might be dreaming, reflect on the situation further to see if you can find more evidence. Then do the check itself at the end to confirm. (The tutorial linked above sums it up nicely).

It is tricky to convince yourself, you just have to be at least open to the possibility this may actually be a dream. Like I said before, it gets easier the more lucid dreams you have because you learn just how easily you can be fooled.

Are you familiar with the MILD technique? This is arguably the best lucid dreaming technique to learn and goes hand in hand with RCs and may help you greatly.