Thread: Hiya! I may have some questions...

Hello! This is my first post here, and I'm looking forward to being part of a great lucid dreaming community!

Now that I have that out of the way, I have some questions. First, it's important that you know that while I'm not new to lucid dreaming, I'm still very much a beginner. I've had a few successful lucid dreams in the past that were my doing, but I quit for a while, and I'm very determined and eager to get back into it. For the past week and a half, I've been doing reality checks, and keeping a dream journal, and I've tried WBTB a few times (and almost WILD'd twice in the same morning! ), and I often try MILD while falling asleep. However I want to make sure I'm doing all of this correctly before I go any further.

My plan for reality checks is that whenever I enter a new room/location/destination, I perform a RC. My RC is that I count my fingers (the only LD's I've had involved me having way too many fingers), then I pinch my nose, then I ask myself how I got to where I am, where am I going next, and if this is normal. If there is a mirror in the room, it's my only RC and I push on it after I say "If this mirror is not completely solid, I'm dreaming."

My question is, what is a better time to do a RC? On occasion, I'll forget to do them, and I thought that since a dream jumps around a lot, it would be ideal to do a RC whenever I was in a new location. However this is not so. My mind only registers a new location by way of the passage leading from A to B, which rarely occurs in a dream. Also, last time I was into lucid dreaming, I decided I'd do a RC whenever I saw a certain color, but that was too often, and it became a tiresome chore. So when should I do a RC so that it happens often in the real world and in the dream, without me having to do one every 5 seconds?

I have good success with just doing them randomly throughout the day, without prior input telling me to do an RC. Apart from that I'm trying to do more RCs while watching movies and the likes because a lot of my dreams don't involve myself, hence I'm just watching.
Further you could target other dream signs with RCs, but you'll have to find out your dream signs pretty much on your own.

Unfortunately, staysharp, the problem with dream signs for me is that the only one I know of is that whenever I have a dream that happens at my house, it's my old house, and I don't ever see that place in real life. And I'll give random RCs a try, but what if I end up not doing enough throughout the day?

Well as said you'll have to find out some dream signs you can use then. Recently I found out through journaling my dreams on this site that I regulary dream about complex structures, something I didn't even thought about before. If you have some dream journal lying around at home, I recommend to you to put them on to DV and giving individual tags according to what happened. That way you'll see if a tag appears more often than others.
As for doing not enough, it's more about seriously doubting your surroundings once in a while rather than permanently doing RCs. It's important to really consider that you're dreaming. I do about 10-20 RCs a day and it is enough to rise my awareness as far as to get me lucids at least once all 3 days currently.

Okie doke, I'll put my dream journal on the site.

As for the RCs, would it be better if I was just in a constant state of "hmmm, this could be a dream...", and did a RC just every now and then?

That depends on you. If you manage to thoroughly doubt any minute of your life that would be pretty awesome, since that'll definitely carry over into your dreams. Otherwise it should be fine if you do it like me, live your life normally and just suddenly once in a while start to completely doubt reality and don't stop doubting until you're sure you're really not dreaming. Especially if something odd happens.

It also can't hurt to go with the guides and advice of someone else sometimes for a change, so make sure to take a look at threads like this:

SAT - Sporadic Awareness Technique | A DILD Variation by Puffin

Alright, will do. You've been a great help. Thanks!

No problem, hope to see you around on DV. Don't forget to post some storys of success and to give a like to the posts that helped you the most