Thread: Reality Checks

look at your surroundings and try to remember how you got there

Stare at one spot for ten seconds. Movements are crucial to REM and things will distort heavily.
Can you see your nose with an eye closed?
Are you seeing perfectly without glasses?
Can you see the frame of your glasses and the blurred area outside?
Expect something to happen genuinly, did it?
Pull on your fingers, do they stretch?
Look at your clothes, do you own them?
Think about the past five minutes.
Did you just do something you're scared to do in real life? (Initiate sex, yell something embarrasing)
What time is it? Does this make sense?
Why am I here?
Just realize you are dreaming, did you feel free?

I could go on longer.

Think about sex. If you wake up, you were asleep.

I'm sure most people will naturally use that RC.

I do these:

- Finger through palm.

- Breath while pinching nose.

- See your hands and count the fingers.

Any really obsure ones that no one knows about?

Originally Posted by Alexander1656

Any really obsure ones that no one knows about?

Mzzkc would joke about jumping out of a tall building, but I wouldn't recommend that.

There's one I want to try but I have no idea if it will work (I will try it in an LD and report back):

(In R/L) Look at an object in the distance then hold up a finger about 6 inches in front of your face but ensure your focus remains on the object in the distance. You should see two fingers. Is there a difference between what you see in R/L and what you see in an LD?

Originally Posted by Alexander1656

Any really obscure ones that no one knows about?

I've been trying to invent totally new ones but I've also been trying to make my use of the existing ones more dynamic.

I've done this because I've found RCing all day - without results - really frustrating and I wondered if the constant RCing becomes too much of habit so that your brain no longer dreams about it. I mean, I spend a lot of my time in the day biting my nails or repairing the damage I've done biting my nails and I'll also bite my nails last thing at night but I've never dreamed about biting my nails. It also occurred to me that I'm constantly pushing my glasses back onto my nose but I never dream about that either.

To attempt to overcome the problem of the "RC habit" I've now started ensuring that each time I do an RC it involves utilising my environment in some way. For example, to do a nose pinch I'll pick out a random object in the room and ensure that the object is involved in my nose pinch. So, if the object is a pen I'll pick up the pen and the pen plays the role of the thumb and pushes one nostril shut while my other thumb closes the other nostril.

Another nose pinch variation I've devised is the "mutual nose pinch" where I'll visualise me nose pinching a DC's nose with my hands, and the DC nose pinching my nose with his hands. Like a, "Hey, let's help each other realise this is a dream" kind of thing. I've only been doing that visualising a week and on two dreams this week I've had DCs put their face right up to my face and in one of those dreams I became lucid.

Originally Posted by Alexander1656

Any really obsure ones that no one knows about?

I do believe some I posted were unknown for the most part.

The only RCs I use are pinching my nose and see if I could breathe, and look at a watch, then look away, look back again and see if it changed.

Though it never hurts to look at my surroundings and questioning myself.