Thread: Nose pinch reality check.

Originally Posted by hellohihello

I used it all the time.. Now it fails. I still have plenty of others to use but how on earth does it fail? You can't suffocate in real life, but it feels just as I do it when I am not dreaming.

I know a few have experienced this, but why? How do we have " difficulty breathing" in our dreams and will it affect our breathing in our sleep? It just boggles my mind!

Thanks, Hellohihello

yeah tell me about it. your brain adapts somehow. A hand RC used to be the most reliable thing out there for me however Just a few hours ago I started flying (my main dreamsign) and did a hand RC several times and nothing so I didn't gain lucidity. Seriously contemplating wearing a digital watch as I hear that always works.

Originally Posted by hellohihello

I used it all the time.. Now it fails.

oh yeah! doesn't that suck? I used to pinch myself but now it really hurts.. anyway someone else had the same problem with nose pinching earlier, but i can't remember who it was... she just found something else :/

Isn't breathing a feeling? because that would make another question - when we breathe in dreams, is it an imagined feeling, or is it connected to how we breathe in real life? I think breathing in dreams is fake, personally. its just that we do it 24/7 that makes it natural to be thinking about it in your dreams.

so, good luck finding a new RC, haha

Yep, check out my dream journal entry number 51 to read about my experiences with the nose pinch test finally failing after enormous lucid success with it for two months. It took me three weeks to get back into regular LDs due to having to retrain myself with a new RC which was to look at a digital watch. I had to form the new habit strongly enough that I would do it in dreams and not revert back to my old habit of nose pinching. I gave up the nose pinch test altogether to help break the habit.

Now I'm getting lucid regularly again using my digital watch which has a message on it that scrolls across when I push a button which says "Are you dreaming?" The perfect reality check lol! It hasn't failed yet and my friend who has been lucid dreaming for 20 years says he's never seen digital numbers act normally in dreams. If I were you guys I'd be buying a digital watch tomorrow! Doesn't need to be expensive. Analogue won't do. It will function normally in your dream! It must be digital!

The bottom line is, once a RC has given an inaccurate result in a dream then it becomes useless. The whole point of it is lost. It would be like buying a car that only starts "sometimes". How useless is that?

This is the reason DV disappoints me. Every time someone has trouble with a physical RC, everyone starts gathering around offering other physical RC solutions that are just gonna stop working in 2 months anyway.

MENTAL RC. SERIOUSLY.

Originally Posted by hellohihello

but how on earth does it fail? You can't suffocate in real life, but it feels just as I do it when I am not dreaming.

I know a few have experienced this, but why? How do we have " difficulty breathing" in our dreams and will it affect our breathing in our sleep? It just boggles my mind!

It fails because it's just like any other dream hallucination. You're focusing on the fact that you shouldn't be able to breath, you're expecting not to, and your mind processes what you expect. A hallucination that you are not getting air through your nostrils, just like it can process a dancing gorilla with a tuxedo on or a serial killer with a knife at the end of your bed.

Your breathing in dreams should not, as far as I've read, do anything whatsoever to your breathing in RL. This is, as I've stated, all hallucination.

You are reality checking wrong. On top of the advice below, with your reality check you should be EXPECTING it to work, imagining the feeling of the air shooting down your nostrils and your chest expanding. You aren't feeling your REAL nostrils or sinuses. You're feeling dream nostrils. So tell them what they are feeling, that cool air rushing in, and imagine it every time you RC.

And for the love of god:

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

MENTAL RC. SERIOUSLY.[*bold/size added for emphasis*]

Do an RC properly, and it will never, EVER let you down and stop working. Don't blame the RC. Blame yourself.

To add to the idea of a "metal RC," ask yourself if what's going on around you makes sense. Every time I've managed to RC in a dream, I've already been thinking that I could be dreaming. The reality check merely confirms my suspicions. That doesn't mean that physical RCs are useless (you may find yourself flicking a lightswitch and suddenly remember that it's a common reality check), but if you approach them with the wrong mentality, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Ask yourself what you've been doing, where you are, how you got there. Does the answer make sense? If not, you're probably dreaming. Does anything in your environment look out of place (is the alarm clock on top of the oven?)? Then do the RC to confirm your suspicions. Do an RC even if you think you're awake. Plan to do two of them! Then, if one fails for some reason, you have another that could work.

It's easy to get into the habit of casually plugging your nose and trying to breathe. Remove the monotony and do each one purposefully.

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

This is the reason DV disappoints me.
MENTAL RC. SERIOUSLY.

Sorry to disappoint you, pojmaster17q!

As for the mental RC advice, yeah I do this and it still fails sometimes. Don't forget you are RCing with your dreaming mind, which is not 100% compus mentis and can give you false memories and information. This is why I like the digital watch RC. Because either the watch works or it doesn't, and my friend has never seen digital numbers work properly in dreams in over 20 years. So at the moment I'm running with that. Thanks for your advice though

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

Don't forget you are RCing with your dreaming mind, which is not 100% compus mentis and can give you false memories and information

Which is why you should foster overall awareness and critical thinking, so that in your dreams you use that same intense contemplation whenever you reality check.

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

Don't forget you are RCing with your dreaming mind,

No, I'm not.

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

Sorry to disappoint you, pojmaster17q!

As for the mental RC advice, yeah I do this and it still fails sometimes.

I'm not so much disappointed as amused that you can fail a mental RC.


Maybe it's because I'm a logical person, but I don't understand how anyone can ask themselves if they're dreaming or not and not automatically know.

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

Maybe it's because I'm a logical person, but I don't understand how anyone can ask themselves if they're dreaming or not and not automatically know.

It's possible to fail a mental RC if they are in a dream that closely parallels real life. More often than not, the fact remains that most of us don't even think to check that we're dreaming. It's hard to get into the habit of looking for things in real life that are out of the ordinary, only paying attention if something strange is right before us.

It's a matter of re-training your thinking. If you can get into the habit of doing mental reality checks along with physical RCs, you will be much more likely to catch when you're dreaming.

I don't think I am dreaming very often, but when I do, I'm usually fairly certain before I do anything else.

Interesting, thanks everyone

Next lucid task: See how long I can keep my nose pinched for.

It would probably be a good idea to do multiple reality checks at a time, so if one type fails then another type might have a chance of working.

Originally Posted by Hazel

It would probably be a good idea to do multiple reality checks at a time, so if one type fails then another type might have a chance of working.

I do this sometimes, but it's inconvenient to do both a hand and nose RC every time you just want to RC.

Originally Posted by Hazel

It would probably be a good idea to do multiple reality checks at a time, so if one type fails then another type might have a chance of working.

I do, I like the hand reality check I do the nose pinch to confirm my dream.

Hm funny... most of times mental RC fails for me, as so does many other physical ones lol But I agree with Shift on the reason.

Originally Posted by pojmaster17q

No, I'm not.


I'm not so much disappointed as amused that you can fail a mental RC.


Maybe it's because I'm a logical person, but I don't understand how anyone can ask themselves if they're dreaming or not and not automatically know.

Um, yes you are. I'm talking about when you do an RC during a dream. In other words, when your mind is dreaming.

As for automatically knowing you are dreaming, if that were the case there would be no need for this forum and everyone in the world would be lucid dreaming every single night. My dreams are as real as real life visually and sometimes my mind has false 'memories' eg this morning I dreamed I saw my dad at work. I have never seen him in my life at work but in the dream I artificially "remembered" that I've been seeing him at work quite a lot lately when in actual fact this is not the case.

So mental checks work sometimes, other times they don't for me. But a digital watch always looks screwy, so I'm running with that RC.

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

As for automatically knowing you are dreaming, if that were the case there would be no need for this forum and everyone in the world would be lucid dreaming every single night.

I automatically know I'm dreaming when I ask myself if I'm dreaming. I don't do it constantly.

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

Um, yes you are. I'm talking about when you do an RC during a dream. In other words, when your mind is dreaming.

I consciously question my situation, even if my mind was previously unaware.

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

My dreams are as real as real life visually and sometimes my mind has false 'memories' eg this morning I dreamed I saw my dad at work. I have never seen him in my life at work but in the dream I artificially "remembered" that it's quite normal for me to see him at work.

If you consider memories in dreams to be "this is usual" of course you have those memories. If people didn't think of things as usual they would always be lucid. You have to think of exactly how you got into the situation you're in. Let's say you're at work. Do you remember everything at work that day up until that point? How you got to work? When you woke up?

Even if your dreams seem real, you have to ask yourself if the situation could happen in real life, and if it's logical. Another part of a mental RC is thinking about whether you went to sleep or not.

Psychological preperation is only half the battle.
No matter how prepared you are psychologically if your brain chemistry isnt right, you'll not get lucid.

Its the same as learning to drive, you can take all the lessons and be completely prepared, but if there is no fuel in the car, it'll make no difference if you had zero lessons or a thousand.

Same with lucidity, if the chemicals under the hood arnt flowing, then the psychological preperation wont make a difference.

This is why we fail, not because we are not logical enough, but because sometimes your brain chemistry, and your logic centers are not functioning on a biochemical level. They may as well be blind drunk.

Some of you may be more Vulcan (star trek reference for those who have no idea) and be more prone to a consistent logic due to your brain chemistry, but that is certainly not the NORM for most human beings. The rest of us will have failed reality tests not out of lack of understanding or effort, but out of pure biology.
It's no different from something like getting an erection; it's 50% psychological and 50% biological.
Viagra wont work unless you get psychologically turned on.
And psychological arousal wont get you hard if your body is low in the chemicals needed for erection (or any other biological problem)

Lucid dreaming is just as complex (and probably a lot more) than getting a boner. But the same principles apply.

It may be a crude example, but its really important to try and remember that we humans are just as much hardware as software.

Originally Posted by hellohihello

Interesting, thanks everyone

Next lucid task: See how long I can keep my nose pinched for.

haha. do it.
tell me how it works out for you

Originally Posted by spaceexplorer

This is why we fail, not because we are not logical enough, but because sometimes your brain chemistry, and your logic centers are not functioning on a biochemical level. They may as well be blind drunk.

That's true. Personally, lucid dream for me is akin to physical exercises: to make more complex ones requires both mental discipline to make yourself follow schedule, and gradual adapting body to do this. That's probably why LDing becomes easier with a time: brain adapts itself, and grow neccessary "muscles".

As for RC's I also bought digital watches with lots of functions including memos, so now when I press one of the button, word "DREAM" appears on the screen . And one can make several RCs based on digital watches. Another good thing is that watching at the clock every 5-10 min is more "natural" than doing, say, nose RC.