New thoughts on Nose Pinch RC (and why it's King of all RCs!)

I came to a realization in the last few months when discussing RCs online. I've always personally used nose pinch as my #1 go-to RC, and could count its advantages over just about every other RC:

+ it's fast: nothing to find, your hand and nose are always "right there" in the dream, just one quick inhale and/or exhale and there's your answer
+ results are *usually* always clear and unambiguous (unless you have nasal congestion)
+ you can do it in the dark/void (this has helped me on numerous occasions)

(In this discussion I'm not addressing problems like not giving enough attention to your RCs, or ignoring the results of them -- a 100% perfect RC could still fail due to these "user errors.")

Everyone has their favorite RC, and that's fine, what's really most important is that your RCs work *for you*.

But here is my reasoning as to why Nose Pinch is best: it is unique among RCs in that it avoids expectation problems by having one foot solidly in the physical world.

When you do a nose pinch in dreams and take a voluntary breath, you are using your physical body's diaphragm (which is the only unparalyzed large (semi)voluntary muscle in REM atonia). Your physical body's airways will not of course be blocked by your dream hand plugging your dream nose. And this is something I've always noticed about nose pinch in LDs: more than just the fact that I can breath through the "pinched nose," it is that I have a distinct impression that my breathing apparatus/airway is not connected to my dream nose.

All other RCs that involve inspecting or interacting solely within the dream world suffer the problem that your dreaming mind alone produces the result: hands can look like waking hands, you may be able to read text (or think you can!), light switches may work fine, gravity may feel like waking gravity and behave as such, and so on. But with nose pinch, the inhale/exhale take place in the physical world, not the dream world, and so your subconscious is not free to "troll" you with waking-like results.

So there's my case. I think it's interesting, and don't recall reading that in any other literature before.

Thanks for the thread! I like that idea of it not being able to be stopped by your expectations. i have noticed that a lot of people that use it and claim it "failed", mean that it didnt fail and they just didnt become lucid (they could breath, but didnt know what this meant).

i personally dont use this RC, but that is mainly because 3 months of the year i cant breath out of my nose. :P so i wouldnt want to flip flop back and forth between the two. i think i am a special case tho, since i dont think most people have allergies like me.

I had not before tied the physical function into the dream world RC. Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.

I couldn't agree more. It's a foolproof RC, as long as you do it in a dream you will become lucid. I use this RC exclusively now.

The only drawback is that, it's so powerful you are tempted to do it mindlessly during the day, thus taking away some of your daytime awareness.

A while ago (a looong while ago) I had a dream in which I did the nose pinch but I couldn't breathe through at all. Also, sometimes in a dream I will do the nose pinch RC and I will be able to breathe through, but only slightly or with difficulty. Or maybe that's because my nose was just stuffy in real life... Okay, yeah, if that's true, then my logic is gone.

Nonetheless, I still use the nose pinch RC as my most reliable reality check. Like you said, it's pretty difficult for the mind to bypass the body's breathing.

Though I'm sure that some people have had dreams where they weren't able to breathe (at all, ie a drowning dream). So surely, in some cases the dream can fake not being able to breathe. Just a thought.

Yeah, I've had a few failures (ie. not being able to breath at all through nose, while dreaming) with the nose-plug rc, but very few. I'd say it works about 95% of the time for me, which is plenty satisfactory. None others I've tried have had close to this reliability + speed.

I find it also doesn't look as weird in public busy places. A quick - what looks like an itch, to the nose and an inhale. Done.