Performing Reality Checks
Reality checks are another key aspect to gaining lucid awareness within your dreams. By incorporating reality checks into your waking life, you can benefit from the integration into your sleeping state. Executing this method will increase your frequency of lucid dreams by up to 30%. Also, the practice of consistent reality checks will promote 'lucid living', which greatly enhances the vividness of your lucid dreams.
What Are Reality Checks?
To increase your ability to induce lucid dreams, you must master differentiating the difference between waking life and the sleeping state. One of the ways of doing this is by performing what's known as reality checks.
Think about your own experience. Most of the time when we dream, it's so realistic that we only realise we were dreaming when we've woken up.
By performing frequent reality checks in waking life, they will integrate into the sleep state and inform your conscious mind that you're dreaming. Reality checks are usually unique to everyone. Some common myths online about lucid dreaming is that reality checks aren't subjective - they are.
What Makes A Good Reality Check?
What makes a really good reality check that's easy to apply in waking life that will inform you that you are infact dreaming? To be completely honest, the possibilities are endless. However, it's important to make sure that you are performing 'correct' reality checks, one that can definitively differentiate your waking state from the sleeping state. I'll explain what I mean by 'correct' reality checks.
I might ask you, how do you know you're awake right now? You might reply:
I might ask you, how do you know you're awake right now? You might reply:
- Because I can see clearly
- I can feel my keyboard
- I am aware
- Because I just am! I'm reading this article aren't I?
Well, the problem with those are that you can experience all this while sleeping too. It's important you perform reality checks that will stay true in the illogical dreamworld. Below I will tell you the top 10 most common reality checks.
Top 10 Most Common Reality Checks
- Sight - Can you see clearly or less clearly that usual?
- Breathing - Can you close your mouth, hold your nose and still breathe?
- Flying - Can you fly or hover above the ground?
- Mirrors - Does your reflection look normal in a mirror?
- Math - Can you perform complex math problems and get the correct answer?
- Time - Can you read a clock face and tell the time?
- Words - Can you read a sentence, look away then look back and still read the same words?
- Hands - Do your fingers look normal close up?
- Physics - Can you travel through solid surfaces?
- Gravity - When you jump, do you float back down?
Of course these are just some of the common reality checks and not all will stay true for you while in the dreamworld. It's important to experiment and establish which works best for you.
