Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

This comes up frequently, and not that long ago recently. I will attempt a brief answer and Sageous will I'm sure fill in what I get wrong or missed.

An RC is a quick simple check to determine whether or not you're dreaming. That's it, no more, no less. For example: nose pinch: can you breathe? Yes->dream, no->awake. Pretty simple. Now, yes while doing the RC you should do it not while distracted, you should for that brief time give it your full attention, to avoid the undesirable habit of doing an RC in a dream and then just ignoring the result and moving on non-lucidly.

A practice of performing RCs while awake typically does not build self-awareness. It's the other way around: elevated self-awareness causes you to do the RC in the first place. Some people say that doing RCs habitually/frequently during the day will causes the habit to transfer over into dreams, but for myself personally, I do not see that. If you're in "zombie mode," briefly tune in long enough to perform an RC, then immediately zone out again, you're not really working towards becoming lucid in dreams.

But then how does one build self-awareness? That's where developing a critical faculty comes in. Other ways of devleoping awareness include: Sageous's RRC; mindfulness/vigilance, meditation, and so forth.

In short, learning to pay attention to yourself and your mindset/interactions with your environment. Being lucid while awake is the best way to be lucid in dreams.

Going through a series of questions is not harmful I think but just sort of unnecessary, at least once you get into the swing of being tuned in: once you're familiar enough with the feel of a dream, when you pay attention (are mindful, etc.), you just "know" that you're dreaming. While RCs can be very helpful to confirm the dream state, it's the awareness that gets you to doing the RC "heyyyyy, something's odd about this".