Hello from southwest Florida!

**Tarvus** · 08-03-2013 04:55 PM

Hello everyone,
I'm new to this forum, but not to lucid dreams. I've experienced a variety of lucid dreams, OBE's, false awakenings and sleep paralysis events dating back some 43 years. I've come to believe such experiences are somehow related.

Though I've had a number of such experiences, they are sporadic and infrequent. Recently I have refocused my efforts to increase my ability to enter a lucid state while dreaming and look forward to sharing and discussing the techniques others are using to successfully do so. I'll be happy to share methods I've employed with anyone interested.

Interestingly, in the past week I have had two experiences which might be called "near lucid" dreams in which I questioned whether or not I was dreaming in the dream, but failed to achieve full lucidity.

The first happened near the end of a lengthy non-lucid dream. During the dream, I suspected I might be dreaming and even went so far as to walk up behind my wife, tap her on the shoulder and ask her "am I dreaming or is this real?" She replied "You're not dreaming". I believed her and continued in a non-lucid state - despite the fact her hair was an entirely different color than she has in real life.

The second experience happened last night. I have been frequently performing reality checks throughout the waking day in hopes I would do so during a dream and hence achieve lucidity. In the past, this has worked well for me. My typical reality check is to look closely at my hands and poke each palm with the opposing index finger, then pinch my nose to see if I can still breathe through it. If my hands appear deformed, or if I can poke a finger entirely through my palm, I know I'm dreaming. Likewise, if I can breathe through my nose with it pinched shut, I know I'm dreaming. Last night, I had an apparent false awakening. I looked at my hands and they appeared normal. I could not poke a finger through my palms, but when I attempted to do so my hands deformed. This SHOULD have been a tip off that I was dreaming, but I failed to recognize it. I forgot to do the nose pinch check, but did decide to rub my hands together to see if it generated friction. It did, so I assumed I was not dreaming and went back to sleep. It was only when I woke up for real this morning right at dawn, that it occurred to me that I had performed the above mentioned reality checks in full daylight (during the middle of the night!)

Obviously I need to do some more work on reality check recognition!

**JoannaB** · 08-03-2013 06:23 PM

Welcome to DV, Tarvus! LOL about your reality check failures, yup, sometimes our brains are just not aware enough to realize that if one asked a dream character that it is a dream, one should not trust the response.

One of my reality check failures which I then luckily managed to turn around into an LD after all, happened in an elevator in which a woman was busily setting up a poker table, and I noticed the elevator buttons were out of order, so I looked away, and looked back, and they did not change! Luckily, I then did not trust the results of this RC, but rather thought to myself "screw that. I know I am dreaming," and only then did the numbers oblige and rearranged themselves while I was looking on, into a different wrong order.

Thus, if one is aware enough, one can become lucid despite RC failure. And if one is not aware enough, one can remain non lucid despite doing an RC, which shows that you are very close to lucidity but sometimes can't quite make the change.

Wishing you a successful switch to lucidity in your next dream!