- pinch your nose and try to breathe through it
- Count your fingers
- Check a clock
- Read text
- Ask how you got here.
- Ask where/what/why.
- Try to observe stillness.
- Stare at one item for way too long and watch it gain detail.
- Ask strangers impossible questions about your self.
- Close your eyes and see if you remember opening them.
- Check if text and numbers change or fail to stay tell a coherent idea.
- Do not disturb the second ones as it just wakes you up.
- Just confidently Harry Potter your ass though a wall, it will work if you convince yourself.
- Stare at your hand for too long, 5 is hard to keep track of.
- Look in a mirror and watch your brain short out a bit.
- Hit a light switch a few times, see if lights break reality.
Adding to this:
- Phones/computers never work correctly
Gosh, I have that recurring theme that I want/need to call 112 (European 911) but mistype every time… Three digits. But I will fail every time.
Trust me, you won’t fuck up if you ever need to.
How do I know? Have called multiple times.
That first one is the only one that almost never fails me.
There’s only been 3 or 4 times out of hundreds where I was like, yep, that’s normal, and didn’t become lucid.
Reading text works really well for me.
When you realise that you can choose the text before you read it, you’re on the road to lucid dreaming!
Carry a totem, like, say, a top.
One happens when you sleep. The other happens when you’re awake.
Slow down there, Jimmy Neutron. Can you use simpler terms?
You + bed = dream
You - bed = reality
Meh, don’t worry about it… whatever environment you find yourself in, navigate it the best you can. Reality might be real to someone experiencing it, but it’s irrelevant to someone who isn’t.
Anecdotal, but I once dreamed an entire Wednesday. Got up went to work, a few hours in realised it was Wednesday all over again.
I suspect that one’s mind can differentiate a dream from reality because dreams are not a simulation, they are not internally consistent or even generally comprehensible, while reality is.
In the high stress times of college, on multiple occasions I dreamed my entire morning routine and walk to class, only to wake up and do it all again.
One time I dreamed the whole thing, “woke up” and did it again, but THAT one was also a dream, woke up for real and did it all again a 3rd time.
Had the same shit happen to me in college too. College is one hell of a time…
It was in the midst of my 4000 level classes, maybe 3 hours of sleep for several days in a row, not eating right, all that shit will ruin your mind
That must have felt like some kind of ground hog day situation
So many buses lost: I woke up and got in, only to realize that it was a dream 😂
I once was stuck in a loop… for an entire year. It felt like a year too and waking up was something that made me happy.
I’m getting laid.
My dreams usually end with disaster, my life is a continuing disaster that doesn’t seem to end
Well, according to Waking Life, if you flip a light switch and nothing changes, you might be dreaming.
On a similar note, one technique I use while lucid dreaming is to try to pass my right hands index finger through my left hands palm. If I feel and see the resistance to my skin, I know I’m awake.
I mean if I basically even touch water while I’m dreaming, I start to drown until I remember that I can breathe water because I’m dreaming. It was literally just rain, once.
That being said, I don’t go around trying to see if I drown to test if I’m dreaming.
I heard that reading text is another method. If you can read text then you probably aren’t dreaming. Because if you are dreaming the text gets all weird and unreadable.
Waking Life - 2001 Film is an amazing film about lucid dreaming, reality, and the consequences of such. It really is a must watch til the end, it has one of those endings that everyone draws their own conclusions about.
Read something. You won’t be able to get more than a few words in a dream. Doesn’t matter what it is: billboard, menu, homework, whatever. It’s one of the easier ways to tell if you’re dreaming.
I’ve also heard that if you read something, look away, look back and read it again, and it’s different, then you’re dreaming. You can practice this experiment when you’re awake; this will condition your brain to do that reflexively, and eventually you’ll do it in a dream.
One of the possible outcomes of this kind of dream-testing is lucid dreaming. When you’re dreaming, knowing you’re dreaming inside the dream can give you some semi-conscious control of the entire dream universe. Wanna fly? BAM you can fly. Enemies need smiting? SMITE. Done.
Now I’m wondering if the “real me” that, you know is actually real … doesn’t just entirely believe that I’m really real, but is really just a dream of the next level up. Same thing goes for the other direction, with innumerable layers to the onion. How could I possibly know?
fuck
And then wake up before you can do cool shit because you get way too excited about realizing you’re lucid dreaming.
Do many people have trouble with that?
My dreams are all repetitive nonsense that doesn’t even have the quality of feeling like reality. During them I almost never think to wonder if it’s a dream, but if I do then either I wouldn’t be able to hold onto that as a coherent thought, or the dream would just end.
I’ve had a few cases where something made me remember something I experienced and I couldn’t immediately tell whether I was remembering something from a dream or reality.
Assuming you are talking about lucid dreaming, what you want is a “Dream Check”.
In dreams, large areas of your brain are operating in alternative states. This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
What do carry over well are habits. You need to do something, while awake, that won’t do anything when awake, but will in a dream. If you do this habit when awake however, you will also do it in a dream. It working acts as a trigger, you become aware of the dream state.
My personal check is to reach into my back pocket for a bazooka, or other heavy weapon. I obviously never have one, and the action looks innocuous in real life. It also has the added advantage of being excellent for nightmares. Nothing ends a nightmare faster than turning to face whatever is chasing you, while dual wielding AK47s.
At that point, the trick is staying in the dream state. Too excited, and you wake up. Too relaxed, and you fall back into passive dreaming. It’s often best to roll with the dream, and only alter small things. This lets you direct it, but not shatter it.
Happy dreaming.
This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
I must be weird, but I can read in my dreams (and tell time, etc.)
Do you happen to have a photographic memory?
The main issue, I believe, is that we don’t store memories of text well. We also don’t have a pre-built system to go from text memory to text image. The pipeline is 1 way. Writing uses a different pathway in the brain.
A photographic memory would let your mind bypass this, and pull up real memories to fill the page.
No. I do have aphantasia, but that’s the only thing that jumps out to me as weird (in this situation; I’m plenty weird in other ways).
Maybe because I don’t “see” images or have a mind’s eye in the same way other people describe it, things work a bit differently. I still do dream vividly and visually, at least so far as I can tell.
The “reaching for something” is something I’m gonna do. I’ve had so few lucid dreams, two or three, and they ended after I realized that I was dreaming… After trying to stabilize the dream I don’t know why but I kept doing “random and uncontrolled” stuff.
Do you also say something when reaching out for a weapon?
The trick is not to try and control the dream too strongly. The random and uncontrolled stuff is your brain’s white noise being interpreted. By stabilising it, you are waking yourself up. Instead, be gentle. Accept the dream for what it is, at least initially. With practice, you’ll learn to recognise when a change is about to happen, and inject your preferred interpretation/solution.
As for my dream check, it’s silent. Externally, it’s just me putting my hand in my back pocket for a second or so. A spoken method would work, but would really confuse people around you.
Wherever you are, that is real. Make the best of it.
If you are reading this you aren’t dreaming. It’s hard to read text in dreams because the part of your brain that handles text processing isn’t turned on.
Hard but not impossible. I’ve read reddit posts in my dreams back when I used to doomscroll. I remember the text being hard to read but readable sometimes, especially headlines.
I think what happens in those cases is that your brain is inventing the meaning of the text and making you think you are reading it. If you actually pay close attention to the text itself it should begin to fall apart.
Yeah, my brain pulled a fuck you on me. I tried to read something in a dream (as technique to attempt lucid dreaming). My brain constructed the dream to have that text written in non-Latin alphabet.
I check a clock, works pretty much every time. Could be wall, alarm, wrist watch. Dunno what it is about dreams, they are bad with time, minutes and hours won’t make sense if you look for it
Clocks and Text in general. It’s like a bad ai image in my dreams.
I try to check twice quickly and will have massive time changes, like 11:37 then 6:18, but yeah sometimes it’s not readable too, or complete gibberish
Have you read the zhuangzi? “How can I tell if I’m zhuangzi dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s zhuangzi?” is probably the most famous line from that text.
Personally, I think the story is encouraging the joy of not knowing, becoming comfortable in a world that lacks fundamental certainties even about yourself and reality.
If this question interests you, you might enjoy the full text - it’s public domain and there are plenty of recordings on youtube.
