There are several reality checks for lucid dreaming - time tested and reliable tasks for determining whether or not you are dreaming. There are also those that that have passed down through the generations which are just untrue. "Pinch yourself" - this is unreliable because it relies on the false premise that you cannot feel pain in a dream (Note: This is often true, but is not a quintessential aspect of dreaming). In the lucid dreaming community there is also the "look at your hands technique," another misguided method presented from the charlatan Carlos Castaneda (still, all respect due to this writer whom put many people on the path of interest to lucid dreaming, even if he did make up most of his stories and pass them off as actual occurrences).
It's not that pinching yourself or looking at your hands cannot work for testing whether or not you are in a dream. Rather, these techniques are inconsistent and are built on misconceptions about dreaming. Other techniques work EVERY time, or darn close. And there are theoretical reasons to explain why they work. As the years have progressed I often use my own unorthodox reality checks - like sticking my index finger through a window or mirror pane - but this is not the best place to start. In the beginning, I highly recommend the Look Away and Back (LAB) method. In dreams, when you look at a printed word (or a sentence) or at a digital clock (not an analogue clock) and then look away and look back, the words or numbers will have changed. If you repeat this twice, the success rate for this change is 100% (as far as I know). This highly reliable reality test has been used by many lucid dreamers and is the most direct route to lucid dreaming - if you can remember to perform the action. The critical question - "Am I dreaming?" - must precede reality testing and is therefore a somewhat different matter. You may notice a dream sign or just have a hunch, but without moving on to the testing itself even the most obvious dream events are usually not enough in themselves to convince you that a dream is underway. There are many possible reality tests, but the ones mentioned above work so consistently that I don't recommend any other ones for the novice. Where do you find some words or a digital clock? - just look for these and they will be in the environment. Promise. More interestingly, why do these change when you look away and look back. Why are words and numbers unstable in dreams? I propose two answers: |
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1. Working memory (WM) is the conscious manipulation of information in our minds. We possess several types of work-spaces in WM. Two of these work-spaces of WM include the "Visual-Spacial-Workpad" and the "Phonological Loop." The former aspect of WM involves the manipulation of images, and is the part of mind used when we see pictures in our imagination. In the Visual-Spatial-Workpad we can do things like picture an object and mentally rotate it, stretch it, or otherwise change or inspect it. And in the Phonological-Loop we can repeat sonic information, such as when someone tells us a phone number and we repeat the string of numbers in our mind until they can be transcribed into our phone or onto a piece of paper. Turns out, the Phonological Loop (for relatively small chunks of info like the time or a word or phrase) is more stable in dreams than the Visual-Spatial-Sketchpad is. Images in dreams are highly unstable; even if you focus on one object in a dream, it may become more detailed but it is likely to change in one or more ways. If you look away and look back, there is nothing to keep the imagery coherent - the construction of visual imagery takes a lot of processing power and the mind is too busy in dreams to keep-up the task of maintaining the integrity of any particular image. In contrast, the Phonological-Loop is not a huge drain on memory resources when used to hold onto small numerical info or a few words, and you can accurately repeat these data to yourself after seeing them and when you look back at the visual "source" of these words or numbers the source image will have morphed and this can be "tested" against the accurate phonological memory you have been looping. The results can be surprising, even bizarre. The words may change into entirely new words or phrases, maybe a recombination of the original letters, or complete nonsense. The numbers on digital clocks will not only change, but will sometimes form into strange shapes or hieroglyph-like symbols.
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