As we all know, reality checking is one of the basic ways to become lucid. It would probably be fair to assume that the majority of lucid dreamers practice their craft by actively searching for and finding a breakdown in what is normally physically possible. However... There are near-constant piles of threads where a person is venting that a reality check passed in a dream, preventing lucidity. Less often, we get a thread about the people that suddenly know that they are lucid in lieu of anything other than a feeling to suggest it. The more experienced lucid dreamer seems to get this more often than the newbie, and the naturals get this all the time. This has me thinking...

Are reality checks actually working the way we think they are?

A reality check gets performed for one purpose: to test whether the world you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel is provided by your senses or by a mental feedback loop. When you do a double-take at that clock, the thought foremost in your mind is probably something along the lines of "Okay, let's see if the numbers change from the first look to the second look. If they're different, something is definitely up."

When you look, for a moment, you are no longer fully accepting the world around you. You are being skeptical of the most basic concept possible, reality itself. You are literally questioning everything meaningful. This is the mental state that someone practicing dream yoga is trying to uphold all of the time.

The fact that RCs are inherently unreliable some percent of the time suggests to me that the lucidity we derive from them is not from our noticing that the world is behaving strangely, but because they temporarily give us that extreme skepticism.

I'm still toying with the implications of this. Any comments, arguments, discussion points, "Licity you're an idiot"s?