Guide To Improving Reality Checks :)

Hello :D

In my never ending quest to achieve a lucid dream every night, i came up with a few ideas to improve the number of lucids i have per week, and this is one of them.

Its been long known that dreams usually tend to be tied to negative emotions, such as fear anxiety, stress, ect. In fact, with this knowledge many scientists believe that these negative emotions exist to prepare us for possible future threats. I thought i can use this fact to help induce lucidity.

Ok, time for the actual technique. So usually the average lucid dreamer has done reality checks at some point in their life, and gave up trying because most of the time they are a great for beginners but usually become ineffective after a while. My theory is that reality checks are not as effective as they can be because we are not doing them at the right times. 9 out of 10 times we perform reality checks when we are in a calm and peaceful state, probably doing nothing like walking in the hallway at school or watching Tv at home. Because of this, our brain correlates when we do reality checks to when we are basically inactive. However, very rarely do i have a dream when I'm just sitting at home or taking a peaceful walk. I am usually in a very active and emotional scenario. Because of this, i believe the BEST time to perform reality checks is when you are in a stressful situation or in some kind of active state. This technique might make RCs a bit more annoying to do, but as a result, your brain will begin to correlate the time you do Reality Checks to when you are in a stressful or active scenario, and it will become second nature. And of course, since it is in fact the same brain sleeping or awake, the same will occur when you are asleep, at the peak of your anxiety and fear filled adventures.

If you have any suggestions to help improve this theory, please leave a comment below. Thanks :P

Have you had any results after conducting this? I guess I'll throw it into my routine now.

To be honest i just thought of this a day or two ago. I will be giving it a go as well :)

This does seem like a great idea. I usually remember to reality check when I'm sitting down in class. However, when I have a PE lesson, for example, I realise that afterwards I didn't RC once! So I'll definitely try and get the active part of my brain realising and RCing, thanks!

Great idea, jblb! Been doing this for a while now as well, as a fellow member mentioned it in chat before. But thanks for posting it and great job for realizing it on your own! :bravo:

To be honest, I live a very peaceful life, and the amount of times I would RC would be very limited, and it would take a long time to become rountine. And when I would finally be in an active or emotional state, I would forget everything about RCing. But I guess that's what I'd have to work on.

your point is very true..we have to choose a proper time to RC because we want to create a strong link / reflex, a kind of knee jerk reflex.

otherwise, RC will just be another activity, boring, and won't mean that much to you.

i think RC is more effective with visualization, when you can visualize your dreamsign or trigger. thats what you do in MILD, right ?

during the day i think ( just my thought ) its better to develop an aware, curious and playful mind. And prospective memory also ! ( btw , i think its not profitable to couple prospective memory with RC because when you rememeber you are already aware, right ? )


strong emotions seems a very good idea, specially if you are more of a peaceful person, otherwise its not that important ;)

I think that i would come in to few of that sort of situations, the only one i could think of is when dogs are barking at me or something (because i have a phobia) but at that time the only thing i think of is fight/flight-mode so RC's won't be an option here :p In combination with visualization it, on the other hand, would work better i think. Visualize your dreamsigns, visualize the feeling you have in dreams and so on, while doing RC's will work better i think. This is just because the emotionally active and adventurous situations you would find yourself in in dreams would be very rare to occur in normal life i think