Thread: Best reality check for those who wear a watch

This has been one of my primary RCs for years. It was one of the first ones I tried, and it's one I stuck with because it works pretty well for me. Occasionally, I'll instead use another nearby digital clock or any other text or objects which I would expect to be static, if it's slightly faster or more convenient than looking down at my watch.

I've also learned some interesting things from this RC over the years. It usually works well, but sometimes in dreams I somehow have trouble trying to decide if the time has changed from glance to glance, and it can take a while for me to figure out the result of the RC. Or I might find I'm having trouble remembering the numbers or something odd like that. This has led me to realize that since this is something that never normally happens when doing the RC in waking life, I can use oddities like that in themselves as indications that I'm dreaming. I don't actually need to waste time determining if the time has actually changed in that case because I've pretty much already proven I'm dreaming. It's surprisingly hard for me to actually remember this fact in LDs sometimes, but I'm gradually getting better at it.

This also sort of suggests to me that the next step might be to generalize my whole RC approach and practice going through waking life simply observing mundane, ordinary things in general, watching out for any possible sings that I'm dreaming.