Hey guys. I was wondering what typically triggers the "I'm dreaming" moment, where you realise you're in a dream. I understand it can be different for every dream and for every person, but I think it would be interesting to get a consensus on what seems to be the most common outcome.
For myself, I almost always have a general sense that something feels off. It is rarely, if ever, directed towards an actual oddity within the dream. For me, I just realise that something about the dream feels wrong, like "hold on, this doesn't 'feel' like reality". I could walk past a fish with 3 heads and I wouldn't question it, but then I might realise that my experience doesn't feel like I'm in reality. Only after I've had that realisation, would I then think to myself "Ha, of course I'm dreaming. I just walked past a fish with three heads".
This is why I'm basing my current lucid dream practice heavily on trying to build my awareness in waking life, as to me, waking just seems to "feel" different compared to a dream. I feel like when I'm unaware and on autopilot, my experiences seem to be that much closer to what being in a dream feels like for me, so I'm less likely to be able to notice a difference. When I'm aware and present, I feel like my reality is much different to a dream.
Was just wondering if anyone else experiences that moment of lucidity in the same way, or if you usually become lucid after noticing a physical oddity, or if it's just a completely spontaneous realisation that you can't explain? Perhaps there are different "types" of lucid dreamers, and for some people, one type of lucid realisation is more prevalent than the other types?
When it happened for me I had a feeling it was more real then. When I got the feeling I decided to try and push my finger through the wall as it went through viola I realized I was dreaming this has happened in every instance. However I do start off visualizing I am walking up and down my stairs touching and seeing everything then it starts with a different feel incidentally this is from a wbtb I’ve tried it in mediations and it doesn’t work
That's interesting, would you say that it was similar to a WILD? Where you were visualising the journey, and then suddenly you could tell that it was no longer a visualisation and the dream had formed around you?
Hello there, I just had my first lucid dream last night so I can actually answer this question! For me dreams about dreams have become a theme and last night I was in my kitchen when the idea of lucid dreaming popped into my head so I lifted my hand to count my fingers and perform a reality check. My fingers looked horribly misshaped and my arm felt like it was asleep. When I began counting, my fingers stuck together and I counted up to 8 fingers. It was very strange but I'm so glad I was able to finally achieve it!
Firstly, congratulations on your first lucid dream! You've done the hardest part, now just keep it up and I'm sure you'll get many more :)
That's interesting, so you didn't pick up on anything strange, just thought about lucid dreaming and then decided to RC?
@Nathan Kelly Thank you! And yeah, I was in the stage Daniel Love has been talking about quite a while where I was having dreams discussing lucid dreams and techniques and even dreams flat out telling me I was In a dream. I decided that anytime I was thinking about lucid dreaming I would perform a reality check in waking life which I think finally pushed me over the edge. For a while, I don't think reality checks worked for me because I was only doing it based off of a notification telling me to do so rather than observation.
The one that pops into mind was my first, I was sat in my old Mini with my mum, parked up near where I live, she got out and I looked down at my watch, I suddenly remembered that my watch strap had actually broken earlier that day in waking life and I'd spent some time trying to buy a new one online. As I continued to look at my watch, the strap broke apart and the watch fell into the footwell and then I thought "This must be a dream". Didn't last long as I got all excited when I made the car take off into the sky!
For me it depends. Sometimes it is a physical oddity, sometimes it is something that shouldn't make sense, like being out in public right now given the current circumstances of the world (I should pick up on that a lot more tbh). Other times it's just a "feeling" something is off for no real reason. Or sometimes, just seemingly on auto-pilot I've said "yeah, this is a dream" without really understanding what I meant...but the fact that I said that triggered me to do a reality check and TRULY become lucid...although that last type is rare.
Funny enough I actually had 2 lucid dreams a few nights ago (DILDs), each triggered in a different way (thanks to the live-streams, and putting in the effort, and also I think my first time using the sleep tracker video, watching a missed stream before bed, and reading my dream journal really primed my brain for lucidity that night, like a placebo effect. That was the first time I ever had two lucid dreams in one night! I know that is an outlier and super rare though. Anyway, I'm rambling.)
So the first dream, I noticed at one point I didn't have on any pants, only boxers. I thought that was weird so I did a nose pinch test. I was probably lucid for around 5 minutes after that, not as lucid as I could have been. Like I knew it was a dream for sure, but still had "dream logic" mixed in there.
The second dream was triggered by a strange situation rather than a physical oddity like before. I was wearing a mask (because of course, right?) but no one else was, which I thought was weird. There were also groups of people singing everywhere, and that made me instantly snap into lucidity, I didn't do a reality check, I just knew. However, a minute later I did perform the nose pinch test again to try and solidify the dream and get use to the feeling. I suppose this is a combination of physical oddities and strange situations, because after I became lucid, I ripped my mask off, and also took of a winter jacket I had on even though it was sunny. Dreams are weird.
I'm very out of shape lately, but to me it was just similar to doing RCs in waking life: Many times I would spot something specific in the dream that triggered the thought "Am I dreaming", but some other times the thought seemed to just appear for no reason, as if questioning my reality simply out of habit.
Many different things trigger it for me,though certain dream signs are more reliable than others personally (it's very specific to the person I believe). Sometimes I can't point to the trigger but many times I can.
Last time it was a very vivid dream, I was going to a store that is no longer open, I looked at the store realized where I was as I looked into the black windows. I started to realize I was probably dreaming, I do the nose pinch test and ya that's usually how it goes for me something like that.
For me it seems to be a pretty even mix.
Sometimes I'll just be going along with the events of the dream and suddenly I'll realize I'm dreaming for no apparent reason, as if the dream has a certain feeling and I just notice it, or I just have an off feeling about what's going on.
Then other times I see something odd in the dream and think to do a reality check which works too. I've been making a habit of trying to match my reality checks when awake to some kind of event so that I think to "trigger" it in my dream rather than relying on it being randomly done, and I've noticed that this has started to come over into my dreams and made me be on alert for dream signs to think about reality checking in certain situations.
I've been triggered in quite a number of ways. Commonly I'll pick up on something odd, which can be either something specific or general. In many cases this will be a recurring dream sign that I happen to have learned to recognize.
There have been a couple of cases where I apparently had some kind of “dream feeling” that is difficult to explain and realized I was dreaming that way, but this has been rare for me.
I also recall occasionally becoming lucid by happening to think about lucid dreaming during a dream, or even by nonlucidly blabbing something about dreaming right now and then having that remind me that, yes, I *could* be dreaming!
And then sometimes it will happen for no apparent reason, or I won't be able to remember exactly what caused the initial lucidity for some reason.
In a couple of very rare cases, I have actually managed to directly remember that moments ago I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and recognized I was dreaming simply because that is the only way I could be suddenly seeing a different world around me. I suspect these have occurred during very light sleep, or possibly been the result of my being slightly conscious during light NREM just before a REM period. (I have this odd tendency every once in a while to somehow become conscious during NREM sleep, and the unique sensations that accompany the state make me recognize it instantly.)
I'm sure there are some other ways I've forgotten about. I ought to get back to reading/studying my dream journal.
Like you, I find lucidity to be more about how the dream experience feels, it seems charged with potential like new years eve used to feel when I was younger. Also the dreamscape feels more malleable, in saying that I don't think that in itself is the trigger, I often bend the dream "reality" often while nonlucid, lucidity is pretty rare for me these days I have slacked off on my dream journaling, meditation/lucidity practice. Maintaining reflective awareness seems to be a massive catalyst for me.
Whenever I'm going over the dream in my journal, figuring out what should have triggered the 'am I dreaming' response, I generally think back to the dream as not being vivid enough to spark that realisation. I suppose it's just because I wasn't lucid that I don't remember it as vivid. yeah, dreams are weird. Had quite an involved one last night around 5am but didn't become lucid.
Congratulations on your first lucid dream Nathan! There's something special about that first one, isn't there. Before I started training in lucid dreaming I had a couple random LDs, but didn't know what to make of them.
Once I knew that it was a skill that could be learned and then achieved my first, fully lucid dream, I was blown away. The feeling of being in a completely different place that was just as real as waking life was an astounding experience. When I woke up, my first thought was that EVERYONE needs to experience this!
To answer your question, I have found that while many things cause me to get lucid (noticing something is off, doing a RC, etc), it seems that none of those things matter if I am not in the right state of mind.
When your mental conditions are perfect, that seems to be when you can notice these things and get lucid. Unfortunately for me, I don't normally have this sort of awareness until I am at the tail end of my REM window and the dream is really hard to stay in once I get lucid as it is a very fragile state of mind at that point.
I'm looking forward to getting good at WILDS for a more stable experience. Too bad it's so difficult. ;-)
Hopefully, with time and practice it is easier to have a DILD earlier in the REM cycle.
Hi everyone, there is a great discussion related to this one going into the mechanics of dream tests and different ways we realize that we are dreaming:
https://www.thelucidguide.com/forum/dreamstate/the-psychology-of-reality-checks