How do I know if I'm dreaming?
I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming since high school, with just enough success to say that my efforts haven’t been a complete waste of time. I have a lucid dream once every few months, which isn’t great. But I still do reality checks multiple times per day.
The simplest way to lucid dream is to follow two steps:
- Get into the habit of writing down your dreams as soon as you wake up, so you get better at remembering them.
- Start doing regular reality checks.
(But this is also the least reliable method, hence why I haven’t had much success.)
A reality check is when you examine some aspect of the world to see if it looks unusual. An example of a reality check is to read some text, and then read it again. Many people find that in dreams, they have difficulty reading; or the words shift around and appear to say something different the second time.
When I was in high school, I started experimenting with a variety of reality checks. Most of them didn’t work very well. The one that works best for me is to look at my left hand.
- Do I have four distinct fingers and a thumb? Are my fingers clearly solid? Sometimes in dreams, I have too many fingers, or my fingers are indistinct as if I’m seeing double.
- When I look at my palm, is my thumb pointed to the left rather than the right?
- Count my fingers. Can I successfully count five of them? Sometimes in dreams, I have a hard time counting without messing up.
Beyond reality checks, I’ve found that certain things tend to happen a lot when I’m dreaming:
- I look in the mirror and I see that I have a strange haircut. For example, I cut my hair last week, and the other day I had a dream that I only finished cutting my hair halfway, and my hair was half short and half long. But sadly I failed to realize that I was dreaming.
- I’m lifting weights, and I can perform many more reps than I expected, and the reps aren’t getting any harder.
When these things happen, sometimes I notice and become lucid; other times I don’t realize that anything is amiss.
The problem is, I’m stupider in dreams than in real life. In real life, I’d notice if something weird was going on. (I often find myself doing a reality check in real life after something strange happens.) In dreams, the “weird detector” is dialed down, and weird things seem normal. Sure, I’m pedaling a canoe with my next door neighbor and also some guy I went to high school with. And the river is made of sand but then when I look at it a second time it’s made of water now. Nothing weird about that, why do you ask?
One time I was hanging out with a group of friends and I was explaining to them how I do reality checks, and how you have to be diligent to do them regularly even if you’re pretty sure you’re awake. And I thought, I should probably take my own advice and do a reality check even though I’m obviously awake right now. So I looked at my hand and you’re never gonna believe this but it turns out I was dreaming! But then I got too excited and accidentally woke myself up.
Anyway, what’s my point with all this? I don’t know, someone said it might be interesting if I write about my experience with lucid dreaming. My experience has mostly been that I do a lot of reality checks in real life but rarely do them in dreams and even when I do realize I’m dreaming, I just wake up immediately. I just did a reality check before writing this sentence and it turns out I’m not dreaming, my hand looks normal and everything.