I was thinking about the way reality checks work, the basic ones at least. With something like the nose plug, remembering to do it in a dream is supposed to result in you being able to breathe through your nose even though it's impossible.

I know that dreams are made from our own expectations of what will happen as a result of our actions, and that they aim to replicate everyday life. So you'd think that if you did the nose-plug RC everyday several times your brain would know for sure that whenever you do this reality check you would not be able to breathe. Therefore, because you have been constantly reinforcing the fact that your RC won't work, your dreams would ensure that whenever you tried to breathe through a plugged nose you would fail.

Instead, a great deal of the time you can breathe through your nose and you go on to become lucid, and your dream has completely contradicted what happens in real life, even though you've been reinforcing it constanly throughout your day. I realise that dreams are often not realistic, but surely they would conform to a rule that you have tried and tested repetitively and every time got the exact same result in waking life.

This is even stranger with reality checks such as the "finger through hand" one which is entirely impossible in real life, whereas the nose plug could work if you weren't squeezing tight enough, etc. The only conclusion I can come to is that deep down, the logical part of your mind must realise already that you are dreaming before the reality check happens, in all circumstances.

This is even true in the circumstances of more complex reality checks and even to some degree more advanced techniques such as ADA, because your mind would become much more attuned to all of the little background going-ons and your dreams would become far more detailed and realistic. This would mean that the techniques you use would actually be making life harder for you, as you would be less able to realise what is a dream and what isn't. Of course, it would be useful in the respect that your dreams would be more powerful, but it would not contribute to lucids.

With this in mind, are reality checks at all necessary? Can't we find a way to harness this inner-logic and have lucid dreams without effort? Are these just the ramblings of a madman ?