Thread: How do you do a Reality Check?

A reality check is an experiment to see if you are in a dream or in waking reality. There are many ways to do this.
Jumping out a window to see if you can fly is one way, but is usually not a good idea unless you are already sure that you are in fact in a dream.

Popular RC's are to hold your nose and see if you can breathe, look at a watch, look away, and see if the time has changed, look at your hands and count your fingers, try to push your finger through your palm etc.
Use your imagination.

Good luck, and welcome!

I've never Lucid Dreamed yet!!! I can't wait to though. Have you???

I haven't had my first lucid either, I keep getting tangled up with my recall. I gotta try to make dream journaling a habit again.

One important thing: when you do a RC, you must really question if you are dreaming.

Good luck!

Check the Wiki section, it is very useful. A lot of your questions can be answered there. The tutorials help a lot. As for reality checks, click here. When reality checking, you must question reality with effort. The amount of effort you put into RC's during waking life is the same as you would in dreams. Therefore, paying genuine attention to your surroundings is critical to realizing you're dreaming. If you can, without being ashamed of people thinking you're crazy, ask yourself out loud if you are dreaming. Always do numerous RC's, some may not work. Once again, welcome to Dreamviews! I'm sure you'll enjoy it here and learn a lot. Have fun lucid dreaming.

A history check is a good one too. Try to remember how you got to where you are now, making sure your normal daily life connects with the time/place you are. In a dream, it usually won't. You'll wonder where you are, and realize you just appeared in whatever story you're in a few minutes ago.

There are plenty of ways to reality check, but ones you should not use, but which are tempting, are:
- decide you aren't dreaming because you can't do something, like fly or open a door with your mind
- decide you aren't dreaming because everything feels so real, you just know you can't be dreaming

I have never performed one, always knew. Secondly, awareness is relative, and one will have various degrees of awareness even in the same dream or in waking life. Many times, in a dream, I don't care that I am dreaming, I am examining and trying to understand what has been presented. I will often go over the item again and again and often end the night still trying to comprehend the significance of a thing.

Like two nights ago. A record, with large groves as if made of graphit. In two places two sets of straight lines-- one set larger than the other. I kept trying to fathom the significance.

Obvious an old record (probably a book--a production work) with two anomalies.. all I could get. Could be scripture, but I am not sure.

And last night, I think the same idea, only a giant who stood and whose legs spanned two passages of text. Not sure what it all means. Both were about a record and two distinct places in the record. Any way, I examine the ideas of these things while dreaming, not paying attention to the fact that I am awake or asleep. I just ponder the idea being represented trying to figure it out.

Maybe this mediation while sleeping is actually a stage beyond lucid dreaming.

The ability to think about the dream as it is happening has always been one of my favorite aspects of lucid dreaming. You can consider the strangeness of the dream as it is still unfolding. This creates a cool feedback loop, where your thoughts about what just happened actually influence what happens next.

Thank you all!!