Thread: How do YOU know you aren't dreaming right now?

I don't really know. But my reality checks at least are indicating that I'm not dreaming. I'll be really annoyed if I wake up right now. ( Well, I'd be happy I was at least thinking about dreaming in my dream and would just add fuel to my motivation. But annoyed the RC's are not doing their job.) I've had that experience more than once where I was certain I was awake but just happened to do a reality check and discovered I'm not. Like the scenario when talking about lucid dreaming with someone then doing an RC to demonstrate how to do a reality check. And the reality check tells you you are dreaming. And you are like "WTF we are dreaming right now!" I love when that happens.

Also, most of the time when I'm dreaming there is some kind of drama or action taking place. Very rarely am I sitting around alone in my dreams. Right now I'm just sitting here alone in my quiet kitchen. Nothing weird going on or any other people or animals appearing. Or storms brewing outside the window.

My last lucid the other day actually, I was in my living room ( but not alone...) I look out the window and see a massive tornado. The tornado situation turned into full blown lucidity.

Yeah, I think false awakenings are more common with being lucid for the simple fact that when we are aware that we are dreaming the idea of waking up inevitably often comes to mind. Which can cause either a real awakening or a false awakening.

That makes sense, and those are the most likely explanations for what is happening right now.

Better question, how do you know you are not in a multiverse? How do you know if other versions our selves in multiverse are not having the same dreams that we had last night? Perhaps, a better version of ourselves are better at Lucid dreaming, more successful and more patient at Lucid dreaming. Sorry, this was just a fleeting thought?

Originally Posted by braintrust

How do you know you aren’t dreaming right now? That might seem like a silly question, but I found a list of 5 different characteristics of dreams, and all of them can be applied to our lives right now. Does this mean we are dream? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but that isn’t for me to decide, because it is up to you. But if you think about it, so much of what is happening right now, only a few months would have seemed impossible and totally unlikely. The best argument against this being a dream, right now, is that if you trace your time back, you woke up. But if you are a lucid dreamer, then you know all about false awakenings. False awakenings are dreams where you feel like you are waking up, but actually, it is just another dream.

I understand what you're asking, but, on a practical note, it's real easy to know you're not dreaming, should you, of course, think to ask the question: walk out of the room you
are in, wait a moment, then walk back in; if the room is still there, and exactly as you left it, then you are probably not dreaming.

One thing to think about, especially in these times, is that waking-life will always be a greater purveyor of surprise and variety -- good or bad -- than an individual's dreams will ever be. That's because your dreams are created in their entirety by the actions and imaginings of an individual mind, while the real world is created by the actions and imaginings of over 7 billion unique minds, plus, the actions of an entire planet (i.e., weather, days & nights, millions of square miles of surface occupied by more living things than our small minds can imagine, etc.). The very nature of our ever-changing little planet and the humans who infest it promises that unbelievable stuff like we're experiencing right now can happen, and probably will -- the real trick is to come to accept that, and maybe salve the mayhem with the peace and private wonder of our dreams.

Of course, and sort of along the "beyond dreaming " note that Lang just rang, there's a member here named Sivason who might tell you that we're not dreaming the world; The World is dreaming us. In other words, what if we are all part of someone else's dream; just a bunch of sprites playing out the parts some cosmic mind (from our perspective) is inventing one night? If that were the case I sure wish that Great Dreamer would lay off the spicy pasta before bedtime!

Originally Posted by braintrust

How do you know you aren’t dreaming right now?
https://youtu.be/igUSV_ZWyBw

*do you have a trackable back story? I got here in my car at 8:30 because that is when I work. I remember what I ate while getting ready. I just sat down in the break room after 2.5 hours of working at my desk.
* do my magic/super powers work. Try to levitate or use TK
* how much detail; is in the finer field of vision. There are hundreds of fine hairs on the back of my arm, each coming from a pore in the skin. Ilttle blood vessels show through the skin
* can I smell things? Is it low grade like I have a cold or is it normal?
* are there lots of background noise. The fridge hums, the words on my wife's show are clear and make sense. The boiling water is making noise. The typing is also making noise.
This is now my go to way of doing reality checks. Not a trick, simply gauging if the details are subdued like they are in a dream.
Howere, this life of course is part of a dream, but that is another topic.

The quickest check for me is my peripheral vision - it is worse when I'm dreaming.

I think a primary reason why waking life feels like a dream is one's experience of it is literally a dream, though it is a dream that's constructed from information about a shared, objective reality. If it isn't being actively fed with such information, then your imagination has to do more of the work, and that has limitations that can be distinguished from the waking life dream.

I think another reason why waking life feels like a dream is objective reality is less than totally fixed or objective. At jumps and shifts around in ways that we can feel but which are harder to pin down with our senses. Also, it is not totally concretely defined - there's an element of uncertainty to everything. I think that the reality we experience spans a sort of bundle of extremely similar realities which we tend to treat as one reality.

I'm certain that my dreams aren't created entirely by my individual mind. It is true that they're fairly restricted slice of reality though, and when I'm awake the slice I get is less restricted in some ways.

I'm more creative when I'm asleep. I'm not very creative when I'm asleep, but I'm even less creative while awake. As an example from last night, I dreamed of a song called 'The Vampire' went "I dreamt of blood and woke up cold, as if I'd been in snow." That isn't in the actual song. I'm also more intuitive and perceptive of others in some ways when I'm asleep. I can reason when I'm asleep, as if I'm awake, but I'm also a lot more likely to make stupid reasoning errors when I'm asleep.

I don't think of my dreams as being 'private' in contrast to an external reality which is 'shared'. There is a reality which is shared. I'm aware of it in different ways when I'm awake vs when I'm asleep, but in both cases I'm experiencing aspects of what I think is the same reality. As a mundane example....I have dreamed lucidly of being some kind of animal in a tide pool. I'm sure that dream was personal and subjective in some way, not like really being an animal in a tide pool. And yet, in waking life there are real animals in tide pools, and I think my dream experience of that was probably more direct and subjectively accurate than what I'd get from looking at animals in tide pools. The dream is a flawed and limited experience of reality, just as going to the beach in waking life is a flawed and limited experience of reality, though it is flawed and limited in different ways.

Originally Posted by Lang

Better question, how do you know you are not in a multiverse?

I like this, I've only recently learnt about the multiverse, I've been thinking that our dreams might be multiverse tourism.

I'm sort of suggesting, that even waking life is a dream, it's just not as obvious for various reasons.

Originally Posted by braintrust

I'm sort of suggesting, that even waking life is a dream, it's just not as obvious for various reasons.

It is, it can become very obvious with training and time. Just as you learn how to LD there are things you can learn to have dream control in this version.

Yes it's a common topic of metaphysics. Consciousness is energy, energy forms matter. The energy that forms all of reality is awareized energy/consciousness. As crazy as it sounds, to me it's the only thing that actually makes sense.

Originally Posted by sivason

It is, it can become very obvious with training and time. Just as you learn how to LD there are things you can learn to have dream control in this version.

How do you train for this?

Originally Posted by braintrust

How do you train for this?

You could look up Jane Roberts Seth books. She was a channeler that channeled a personality calling itself Seth that wrote a series of books through her. Seth describes in fascinating detail the way in which energy is forming matter, and the relationship between consciousness energy and matter. And Seth tries to convey exactly how our thoughts beliefs and emotions our creating our experience at all times. The second book is titled "Nature Of Personal Reality" is focused on how our thoughts and beliefs are creating what we experience and offers methods of examining the contents of our own minds to sift through our own ideas and beliefs, many beliefs of which we may not even be aware of having which Seth calls invisible beliefs.

However, if you get into that I would recommend reading the first book first simply titled. "Seth Speaks: The eternal validity of the soul." The first book is highly fascinating in itself as Seth describes who and what he/it is and the general nature of reality. Seth prefers to call him/itself an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality. And claims to have lived a series of many physical lives on the earth. And in the second book as mentioned is how we are all creating our own realities. And from there the books get deeper and deeper into detail the way in which energy and conscious create matter and events, and reality in general. Believe the info or not is up to the individual reader but either way it's fascinating stuff. Personally, the information described is so deep and detailed I don't know how anyone could be able to make this stuff up. And Jane Roberts was channeling the Seth books all the way up to the moment of her death. Anyone interested in the metaphysical and nature of consciousness in general it does not get any "more" Than the Seth books.

Sorry I don't have a lot of time at the moment but, I hope this helps!

Originally Posted by Caradon

Personally, the information described is so deep and detailed I don't know how anyone could be able to make this stuff up.

The reason it seems like that, is there's a whole lot of other source material that they're mostly plagiarizing which you haven't seen. If you'd read all the books that the medium had read, then it becomes much less remarkable. The writer tries to hide or obscure their sources to make it seem more like they came up with it themselves, because they want their content to be judged on its own merits. But hiding the sources that way presents a false impression.

In most of these cases there's also a lot of shameless fabrication going on, and its hard for most people to imagine that someone would be so audacious as to just make stuff up like that. Where they're aware of the deception, the writer justifies it to themselves as necessary for the promulgation of their important world-saving message. Also, self-criticism makes mediumship a lot harder. To be an effective medium, you open the door and let stuff flow out. If you try to figure out what you and your source know for sure and what you're just pretending, it interferes and shuts down the intuition. With that kind of thinking, it can be very hard to tell what is real and what is pretend, it doesn't involve the kind of conscious reasoning that would typically make a person aware of the difference.

All the bullshit used to make me angry, once I learned enough to start seeing through it. There's a process of natural selection, where the honest mediums don't write compelling books because they don't have as much to say. Now it still makes me angry, but mostly I've given up on it.

Well, I just come around for the dreaming I avoid debates about the deeper stuff. Otherwise I'd probably say a lot about a lot of things I don't agree with on dreaming forums. But just don't have much interest in getting into it. I'm just here for the dreaming. Rare form of me to even get into this topic of discussion really.

Fair enough.

I pretty much come for the ideas exploration, and don't have much interest in dreaming apart from that. Because of the doors that were opened back when I was exploring the ideas more, things were set in motion in me that began to manifest years later in remarkable lucid dreams. So I came here in an effort to understand the experiences I was having.

Now it seems that nearly everyone has lost interest in dreaming, and in 'spiritual' dreams, this site and most other dream sites are almost completely dead compared to 10 years ago.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Now it seems that nearly everyone has lost interest in dreaming, and in 'spiritual' dreams, this site and most other dream sites are almost completely dead compared to 10 years ago.

I still like that stuff, for what it's worth!

Originally Posted by braintrust

How do you train for this?

Trust the Force Luke

Watch The Empire Strikes Back. Popular fictional systems of magic/ knowledge are based heavily on all that source material ShadowofWind was just talking about.

There is no spoon.

Watch The Matrix (a fun way into understanding how a dream world could work.)

Watch stuff on Quantum Physics- Teach yourself that matter is energy and actually understand/ believe it. Tricks of control come after you can absorb and accept the idea as logical and not outlandish.

In the allegory of Plato's cave we have a man inside a cave. In the cave there is a fire behind him. Between him and the fire are people creating a shadow puppet show on the wall infront of the man. The man is the true self, the intrinsic observer, our awareness. The cave is the mind. Since this is our experience there is no difference between the physical world and the dream world. We experience them both as arising in the mind. Most people just have less control over the physical world.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Now it seems that nearly everyone has lost interest in dreaming, and in 'spiritual' dreams, this site and most other dream sites are almost completely dead compared to 10 years ago.

In a multiverse, in another path (timeline), perhaps those members did stay and those people did not choose what they want to do with their life but, are they happy with that? But, this is this path that they have chosen for themselves. It's sad that they left and I'm missing the older members, and their knowledge that was here before me too but, I think it is okay to outgrow places or people or connections. It's painful but, it happens. That is their paths to take and not ours. We can only welcome the present and our own path. The thing about lucid dreaming and other things, is, once you have the foundation that you need to succeed and the long hard work that goes into it, you don't need to be tied down by other things. Be your better self. (IMO) Thinking out loud. Sorry, back on topic.

Is this a dream, you ask?

Waking reality is very much like being in a dream, it's just not as fluid or malleable. You can shape it however you want it just takes much longer to manifest and will depend on how lucid you are. And by lucid, I mean how consciously aware you are of your own power and ability, and how aware you are about the truth of reality. A good place to start is the first hermetic principle (all is mind) but even great scientists like Einstein and Tesla say everything is energy, your physical body, your emotions and thoughts, and everything in reality all arise out of energy. Think about it, it takes energy to produce a thought or anything at all so it makes sense. But where do you think energy comes from? and what exists outside of reality? outside of time and space? there is a one word answer for all of it. But here's the real kick, when you dive right into it all to learn this truth somewhere along the way you discover that it is all you, that you are the God you seek. This is why all the great mystics say "all is self" or "all is one" because God is all that exists, and you are God.

Put it this way, you can either be dreaming, the dreamer, or the dream itself. Which would you rather be? the dream itself is just that, the underlying structure and not actively participating, dreaming you are unaware and just going along with the story. being a dreamer you are aware and can participate and make changes. I don't know about you but I would rather be the dreamer than just dreaming or the dream itself.

Originally Posted by Eonnn

Waking reality is very much like being in a dream, it's just not as fluid or malleable. You can shape it however you want it just takes much longer to manifest and will depend on how lucid you are. And by lucid, I mean how consciously aware you are of your own power and ability, and how aware you are about the truth of reality. A good place to start is the first hermetic principle (all is mind) but even great scientists like Einstein and Tesla say everything is energy, your physical body, your emotions and thoughts, and everything in reality all arise out of energy. Think about it, it takes energy to produce a thought or anything at all so it makes sense. But where do you think energy comes from? and what exists outside of reality? outside of time and space? there is a one word answer for all of it. But here's the real kick, when you dive right into it all to learn this truth somewhere along the way you discover that it is all you, that you are the God you seek. This is why all the great mystics say "all is self" or "all is one" because God is all that exists, and you are God.

Put it this way, you can either be dreaming, the dreamer, or the dream itself. Which would you rather be? the dream itself is just that, the underlying structure and not actively participating, dreaming you are unaware and just going along with the story. being a dreamer you are aware and can participate and make changes. I don't know about you but I would rather be the dreamer than just dreaming or the dream itself.

I really like your post. You're so spot on. I would like to add one thing to it (and it's completely my opinion). The dream itself is actively participating. It is conscious, just as we are.

A round trip journey in your head
Master of illusion, can you realize
Your dream's alive, you can be the guide but..

Hey MoonageDaydream, glad you enjoyed it - can be difficult summing up lifetime of esoteric research into 1 paragraph haha =)

I was considering altering that part because you are right, it is conscious and aware but to a different level than we are as dreamers. I imagine it's like practicing mindfulness where you become a passive non-judgmental observer, it would be similar to this.

Originally Posted by MoonageDaydream

I would like to add one thing to it (and it's completely my opinion). The dream itself is actively participating. It is conscious, just as we are.

.[/I]

Amen. I say amen because of the religious context. This aspect is represented in Krishna. I do not mean any idea some have that these Gods are walking around and have certain bodies. I mean the deep stuff where they are easier to digest aspects or concepts of something to big to know. In this case the concept of Krisna is that this thing/dream has awareness and can have desires. It is the reason things look beautiful. Because the thing wants to look beautiful. It also is the gateway into understanding how to interact with the dream powerfully. As a player in the dream it helps to know there is a personality with likes and goals that might assist you with some cheat codes.