General lucid questions.

How do you get yourself to actually reality check in your dreams?

And also, what is the basis for reality checking in real life so you get a better awareness?

Thanks for the info.
DreamerDrake

Reality checks are really there to question reality. Getting you into the habit of questioning reality.

If you never question reality, you will never notice you are dreaming.

Every time you reality check, make sure you seriously ask yourself if you are dreaming. Do an RC.

This makes you more likely to DILD, and you will realize you are in a DILD. I don't think people just randomly do RCs in their dreams, they just realize that it is a dream.

The point of doing RCs in dreams is to reinforce the fact that you are dreaming. A lot of times the dream feels to real to be sure that it is a dream or not (sounds weird, but it happens). You do an RC to make sure.

This is how it works for me anyways. My LDs suffer greatly if I do not RC throughout the day.

Just like if you tell yourself now "The next time I get home I'll start the dishwasher" and then you get home and because you created a temporary association of your home to starting the dishwasher you will instantly think (if you have a good short-term memory) that you should start the dishwasher.

It's the same for lucid dreaming. You tell yourself "The next time I am dreaming I will realize that I am dreaming". But here there is a problem how do you know that you are dreaming and what does it mean to realize that you are dreaming? I think that the more you recall dreams and experience some kind of awareness not lucidity, but well you are aware while experiencing the dream but you dn't realize it is a dream if that makes sense, just like you are aware of your surroundings right now, you might not be aware that you are actually dreaming right now!
And when you have experienced more awareness in your dreams you will somehow intituvely feel when it is a more dream like state than physical reality.

To realize that you are dreaming, a good way is to use reality check, because you can then confirm if you are dreaming or not.

So now you know what the wole affirmation really means. "The next time I am dreaming I will realize that I am dreaming" - really means the next time I feel that I might be dreaming I'll perform a reality check. It's important that you really know what the meaning of the affirmations or autosuggestions that you are using. If you want you can make it even more specific and say "The next time I feel that I might be dreaming I will count the fingers of my hand".

By practising short-term memory during the day you can start to remember to do it in your night sleep and dreams as well.

The basic idea of a reality checking during the day is, according to me, best performed if you really try to realize that you can't know if you are awake or not, even though you might right now think you are awake. You have to remember that in a dream you think the same way so if you expect to be awake now you'll might feel that you don't need to reality check in the dream because well you think you are obviously awake. However if you enter this sort of paranoid little state and think "Ok I can't know I am awake and observe what you can see hear and smell, and then perform a reality check to really CHECK if you are awake or not. Well then you have the right mindset for reality checks.

So really try to understand that you can't know if you are awake or not unless you perform a reality check.

I hope this helps. If something was unclear just ask ;)

Reality checking helps you get in the habit of being more aware. It also helps build your prospective memory, as MasterMind explained.

Right that's what its called. Thank you! ^-^