Nice job, photonist! I like the direction you're heading with moving to awareness checks. This increased overall sense of awareness will help so much with picking up DILDs. This is how you eventually build up your capacity to sense that "something's off" in a way that mechanical reality checks by themselves don't do.

Reality checks are great for hammering home that bolt of realization that "holy crap I really am dreaming!" But it's awareness that plants those seeds of suspicion that give you that inkling that something's off.

Cool observation about willpower. I've heard about really similar studies that said the same thing about "decision fatigure". (Decision fatigue is that moment when you are just exhausted from making hundreds of tiny little decisions and just don't care what shade of brown the coffee table is going to be.) As with willpower, ingesting calories helped recharge the decision fatigued subjects. This is part of why dieting and leaning out can create additional stress.

Looking forward to hearing more observations and results from your experiments. BTW, Xanous, are you employing the fasting now, or is this something that you did in the past?