Tygar

I reviewed my LD journal to find what triggered me to do a RC, or to just “know” I was dreaming. I broke the findings into 4 categories
1. “Felt Like a Dream”: In these cases I did a RC because the environment felt dreamlike, even though there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.
2. Emotion: In these cases I was having an emotional reaction to a situation in all instances it was one of the following that triggered the reaction: Surprise, Confusion, or a combination of the two.
a. Confusion can be viewed as an opposite to interest, and serves as a signal to the self to inform the viewer that they cannot comprehend what they are looking at, and confusion often necessitates a shift in action to remedy the lack of understanding. Confusion is thought to stem from uncertainty, and a lack of one's expectations and knowledge being met
b. Surprise functions as a disruption of current action to alert a viewer to a significant event. The emotion is centered around the experience of something new and unexpected, and can be ellicied by sensory incongruity.
3. RC Habit: In these cases I simply did a reality check out of habit.
4. Remembering being awake before the dream: All of these cases were WBTB occurrences.

I tracked every event where I became lucid, or did a RC and didn’t become lucid. (*Note: Technically I could put “Felt Like a Dream” and “Remembering being away before the dream” into the Emotion category because both of those would cause some level of surprise or confusion.)

*I should also note I have never been successful at using the WILD technique, nor can I regularly use WBTB because I have issues falling back to sleep after being awake for more than 10 minutes.*

So for someone who uses DILD techniques (RCs, Mantras, Visualization, Meditative Visualization, etc.) I have found the overwhelming majority of my LDs were triggered by a response to Confusion and/or Surprise. I believe that confusion and surprise tend to triggers a cognitive response which naturally initiates involvement of the conscious mind.

Example: I have many instances where my reflection in a mirror has triggered lucidity. So, in all of these cases I look at myself in mirror. Something is noticeably different with my appearance, of which I am intimately familiar. I am surprised, confused, or both by seeing something that is not what I expected. My conscious mind activates to try to figure out why my reflection doesn’t match my expectation of how it should appear. It tries to find a reason to explain the discrepancy. With my consciousness elevated in that moment, and my current understanding that I could be dreaming at any time (questioning reality during my waking hours), I ask myself if this is a dream and do a RC. I am now lucid.

To use this with my “Text Search” experiment I would have to have an emotional response to the lack of text in my dreams. So far my dream logic has gotten the best of me and I am not surprised by the lack to text. I know this is because 98+% of the time, in real life, I pay little attention to text unless it is in my current interest to read it. In my dreams I have little to no interest to read any text. This is similar to doing RCs out of habit. I have been doing RCs, out of habit in real life, for almost 10 years. Yet I have only had 4 instances where I have done a RC in a dream out of habit.

So, if it is the emotional reaction which triggers the rational mind to engage in an attempt to figure out why the current situation defies current expectation....how and I turn this to my advantage?