While dreaming my ultimate reality-checker is water since I can’t dive into it. But if you don’t live in Hawaii you can imagine it’s not very practical. I tried all sorts of techniques but all of them stopped working after some time. I tried finger counting, seeing my reflection, coin tossing. The technique that lasted the most was making a flame with a lighter that didn’t work.
A false-awakening is the moment when you wake up and you proceed doing the things you normally do but in reality you’re still dreaming. In my opinion it’s a clever way of the subconscious to trick you into believing that you’re awake and see how you would act in real life.
Today I had an epiphany. As soon as I woke up I started writing into my dream journal. Like I always do. In the last false awakening I was crying desperately because someone ripped off the pages from my diary and I couldn’t remember the previous dreams I had. I had 4 false awakenings in a row and the most difficult dreams to recognise are always the last ones.
So finally I’m going to try a new technique that makes me feel very confident. From now on my reality-checker is going to be the diary itself. I’ll keep you posted. What’s your experience with reality-checkers?
That’s very interesting, we have much in common. Usually at the beginning of the dream cycle I’m easily fooled and I just after waking up I realise the absurdity of the things that happened. By the end of the dream many erratic and absurd situations happened so I’m gonna be aware that I’m in the dream state.
This new approach approach is making me conscious during all the last cycles.