Convincing yourself when Reality Checking

A few thoughts:

Remember that roughly 10% of your "active" brain activity is spent in dreams. So there is a 1 in 10 chance that you are dreaming whenever the thought arises. Remind yourself that you're wrong 10% of the time, that's why you're not lucid in all your dreams.

Try to see your experience of the world for what it is, namely a mental model. Both dreams and waking experiences are mental models based on different inputs. A little mental game I play is to imagine I'm an alien visiting the earth for the very first time, I try and engage in a playful "intergalactic tourist/scientist" mentality.

That's exactly what I've started doing since you mentioned it again in the streams (although I think I only started using the 10% yesterday so I might have been going back over one of the videos), it's certainly helping.

I like the mental game, I used to pretend, when I was a kid I might add, that I was an alien and if I blinked many times in a row, I was sending images back to my mothership...so I have a little experience in this field!! haha

Hey Dan! Great question. Here's my thoughts:

I think it's important to consider what The Lucid Guide says, believing that 1/10 of any of your experience could be a dream.

However, I also know that it can be difficult to muster up genuine doubt as to your state because of how unnatural it is to genuinely believe that you are dreaming. I think it could be a case of "faking it until you make it" for want of a better term. You may be genuinely unable to create realistic doubt as to whether you're dreaming or not, at least until you gain more experience in the dream world and start to realise that your dreams can seem just as real as reality. But I think it's still important to try to muster up as much doubt as you possibly can, and you'll start to realise that you can develop this more and more as you gain more experience in the dream world.

One thing I'm doing at the moment, as you know, is focusing on awareness. But more than just focusing on awareness, I'm focusing on trying to almost interrogate my surroundings to assess if anything is dream-like about them. So say I feel the wind on my face, I will question "Is this dreamlike? Is this what should be expected?" or if you're feeling the weight of an object, think to yourself does the weight match what would be expected? I think doing this will both help to build a mental catalogue of what reality feels like which you can then compare to dreaming experiences (once you're more experienced with dreams and can build up a catalogue of what dreamed experiences feel like), but also by repeatedly questioning the nature of things around you, you start to internalise the notion that anything could be a dream. It's not just the weird things like being chased by a lion or seeing your friend morph into a three-legged alien, but normal mundane every day things such as gravity feeling slightly off, or a door feeling slightly harder to open than usual, or feeling a slight breeze on you despite not being outside. I think once you start to realise that it's not just major differences that occur in the dreamworld, but differences in the minutiae of every-day experiences that can show you're in a dream (and that you often miss, even when thinking about your dreams after you're awake) you'll start to realise that anything you experience could be a dream, rather than just the major "strange things".

So I think try and get out of the mindset that something has to be dramatically different for you to be in a dream - because that isn't the case, often it's the very small things that we might not even notice unless we were actively looking for them. This approach seems to be working for me, and I think even if you don't go the whole "All Day Awareness" route, just internalising the notion that any experiences you have, regardless of how strange they are, might actually be a dream, could help with genuinely doubting your reality.

Hey Nathan,

yeah, very good points, I must admit, if I were to add up my experiences which have spontaneously triggered the 'that was weird, best do a reality check' thought, I think it was gravitate towards the subtle oddities, like seeing a fly out of the corner of my eye and then turning to not see it, easily explained but just poke your brain a little.

All in all that sounds like a good attitude to take and as Daniel says, living lucid changes you, to notice things and to react less dramatically or emotionally to things.

...That's my mission then and if I start to find money everywhere like Daniel does then that'll be a bonus!

That's interesting. For me it's different, it seems to be more about the general feeling of "hold on... this feels strange" than it does about specific dream oddities, which is why I feel like working on my awareness would help me. But then again, I'm sure it would be beneficial for everybody!

Yup, can't be a bad thing in the whole LD practice and Living Lucid state of mind.

You mean you get that "hold on... this feels strange" in waking life which you use to reality check or you mean in dreams when you have been lucid in the past? Because generally, that's what has caused me to become lucid. I don't think I've ever done it as a dream sign triggered 'awakening'.

My best natural LDs have been a very strange event where I've said "hang on! that's not right" and got lucid, but often it's right at the end of the REM period and I wake up almost immediately. Somehow need to trigger lucidity earlier on when there's plenty of REM time left!

I'm trying to construct a daydream type thought process to get me in the best state of mind to be susceptible to the thought I could be dreaming.