Concerning Reality Checks

I've been doing a little thinking lately, inspired by a couple of threads I read a while back. They both mentioned ways in which to improve recall, or to help make dreams lucid, and they both had pages and pages of people reporting their successes. The most interesting thing in common was that in both threads, people speculated that the techniques involved weren't actually doing anything to help, but they acted more like a placebo, in that reading everyone else's stories, they were subconsciously convincing themselves it would work. Or something to that effect.

This got me to thinking though - what if this same principle applies to reality checks? The idea is that you get yourself into a routine of checking that certain things aren't out of place or wrong - such as digital clocks, or checking the number of fingers on your hand. This in turn helps you to look out for those things during dreams, and therefore enabling you to become lucid. However, what if doing this is actually influencing your dreams, making said problem appear? You expect to see these things, and therefore making it happen.

Now, I don't consider myself an expert at lucid dreaming - I've had no more than 3 in my life, and I'm relatively new to the concept as well. But as far as I'm aware in my limited experiences, and from reading I've done, you can make things happen as you want in a dream, and that your subconscious also influences your dreams, through the things you've recently been thinking about, doing, and so on.

Long story short, my theory is that reality checks may well be down to us as an individual. If we expect that something unusual might happen in a dream, then it happens. If we trained ourselves to look out for this event, or object, then would our dreams would begin to reflect this, and include said object more frequently?



Forgive me if I'm way off with anything I've said here. Like I said, it's just a thought at the moment, but if I'm right, then it may make it that little bit easier to trigger lucid dreaming. And if I'm wrong, please don't hesitate to correct me haha :)