Thread: Carlos Castaneda's Looking At your hands method?

While I was researching lucid dreaming, I came across the "look at your hands" method by Carlos Castaneda. Have any of you tried this? If so, how effective is it?

this is my favorite technique
my hands are always nearby! (unlike a light switch, a wall to walk through, etc)
and if i look at them while dreaming they always look wavy, and there are never 5 fingers... 4, maybe, or 6 ....

Quite a famous technique and a common asked question here.
It does work and was one of my first triggers to be successful at lucid dreaming.
It helps to have a goal or focus to induce and stabilize lucid dreams.

Looking for own hands in dreams isn't only one. You could also say, look at the ground under you feet too. There are countless others, but his one from Carlos Castaneda is thumbs up with me

Thanks for the feedback, and lately nothing has worked, so I am going to try this.

You wouldn't believe some of the crazy crap my hands have done. 2-10 fingers on one hand, flashing psychedelically, fat, old and wrinkled, invisible, a stump at my wrist, so many fingers it looked like an old-fashioned fan, the list goes on. My point is, if you get at all curious if you are dreaming, your hand will definitely tell you.

I've been trying to do this technique for a couple of weeks now, after I read about it in Robert Waggoner's book "Lucid Dreaming". So far I can't tell if its worked, I have only had 1 lucid dream since, in which I didn't remember to look at my hands, I became lucid another way (in fact a DC told me I was dreaming).

My 1st lucid happened immediately after seeing my hand in the dream. I had actually cut my finger that day at work, and in the dream I was eating some cake and just happened to see my hand (wasn't trying to). My fingers were all weird looking and fat, and there was a strange-looking bandaid on the finger I had cut. But I knew my hand didn't look right, and I immediately went lucid.

Now if only I could see my hands whenever I wanted to!