Nice forum and nice hints! Intro about my recent attempts to dream lucidly, and a question. TIA

Hi people! I am new to this forum and new to lucid dreaming.

Well, not completely new, when I was a boy of about 6-10 I had a lot of lucid dreams, I just didn't know what they were. I also had a lot of nightmares, and (maybe hence) a good dream recall ability. I can still remember a number of different recurring nightmares and other dreams from that time. After I turned about 11, I think, the nightmares went away but so did the normal dreams. I can't remember ever actually realizing that though until a couple of months ago.

Now I am a 30 year old software developer, and some time ago I suddenly hit something on Google that reminded me of all off that and inspired me to read on a bit on this site. Very informative, very interesting. I started to think about it a lot and do as much dream recall as possible. My dream recall ability already seems above average if I can believe the introductionary texts I read on here, though I can't yet manage to work up the discipline to actually maintain a dream journal... I'm planning on changing that though; I will place my laptop in bed with me (luckily my girlfriend and I sleep apart most of the time ;)) with a text editor already opened.

So far the introduction :) Thanks for bearing with me.
Now for my question: after a month of trying to think about LD as much as possible during wake and trying to get used to reality checks, I finally had my first dream where I actually did some reality checks! I am so proud. It was really exciting, probably I knew somewhere in my dream that something was up, because during wake the reality checks are obviously boring as hell... ;)

The problem was: I tried to make a reality check fail really frantically, but they all worked! Everything took place at my office, where I was alone which is already very uncommon... Anyway, what I tried in my dream was:

1) I tried different light switches many times, but all worked as I expected.
2) I tried sticking my fingers through all kinds of materials, but wasn't able to.
3) I tried looking at our clock, but it stayed at the same time forever. (This didn't trigger a RC fail though...)
4) Finally I tried to consciously open a big Unix script that I have been working on for the past week, and could read it perfectly! Then I exited the script editor, ran the script, got an understandable error message, went back into the script, FIXED THE BUG, and ran it again and it worked!

Though that was all conscious reality checking in my dream, after all that I was perfectly convinced that this was NOT a dream and I went on dreaming non-lucidly. And I was so clooooooose!!!!! :( And that for the first time I even did reality checks in a dream...

I am totally baffled by check 4 passing in all that vibrant detail! All I have read about LD would suggest that I should be utterly unable to do anything like that. I must say that I later (wakingly) realized the script was actually very different in my dream than in reality. Which made me wonder, am I on the right way and should I just keep trying and trying and trying again, or are there any pointers how I can make reality checks actually fail in my dreams?

Thanks, and keep up this great forum work.

Well, for me at least with reality checks, i go with the nose pinch. In case u havn't hear of it, its wher u pinch ur nose and breath in through ur nose. In a dream you'll still be able to breath in. So instantly you know if you are in a dream. Try that next time and it should work.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try to work that into my routine and see where it gets me! :)

THANKS AGAIN jmanjohn! Last night I had my first lucid dream and the final trigger for lucidity was your suggestion to pinch nose. AWESOME! :D I wrote another post about it... (But I am not allowed to post a link since I've only been a forum member for four days :( )

This is awesome, I'm definitely going to try to have more! :D

Your welcome. And the nose pinch has always worked for me which is why i suggested it. Plus you can kinda use it in public and it isn't weird to see. I'm not saying hold your nose for 5 seconds trying to breath in, but a quick breath in would work. The more you RC during the day, the more likely you will during sleep.