Reality Check, sort of?

Well I was thinking. Sometimes, when I've been doing a looot of reality checks, they almost start to become automatic; that kind of defeats the purpose of doing them at all. So I've been trying this new thing where I look around, and try to identify where I am and how I got here

BUT WAIT, there's more!
I look at objects, any objects, and start trying to identify where they came from. This is especially effective in my room, as everything is mine. A little more difficult in a public place, but you know. It just helps you to process your surroundings; I know that I generally tend to completely ignore surroundings in dreams. Most of my dreams are in familiar places, or what I believe to be a familiar place during the dream (non-lucid dreams, anyway). So hopefully this should help... Has anyone else had any experience with this technique? Do share. :)

Yes, I much prefer to try and increase my general awareness of what's going on around me rather than trying to trick myself into realising that I'm dreaming.

I've never had much look with dreamsigns, but I do tend to automatically consider things like how I got to places or why I'm doing certain things. I think it happens at a subconcious level most of the time, but if I go somewhere that is very unusual in waking life, I'll get what I can only describe as "alarm bells", like thought process conciously going off in my head screaming out to do a reality check until I leave the place.

I lucid dream once every 5 days on average thanks to this method and hypnosis. :)

I ask my self If I know the people around me for a RC

It is actually really hard for me to do reality checks, even though I'm quite conscience and understand that it IS a dream...It is as if my mind refuses to allow me to do reality checks. Recently I had a dream where my floor-mates and I were arguing over who gets to take what part of Italy. When I realized that we were all out proportion and in a room I'd never seen before I became AWARE that this wasn't real...but continued to accept it as thus.

I'd suppose that for some people that come to realize that they are in a dream, but aren't familiar with the concept of a reality check, their experiences would be similar to mine in many ways.