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?
Looped false-awekings usually happens to me when I want wake up forcefullu bc, for e.g. I feel I have dreamed enought and I am bored. It seems that in such situation my body cannot just wake up immediately on my whim, but the dream tries to meet my expectations and thus false-awakings are created.
Don't need any kind of "reality-checker". The enviorment in my dreams is rather erratic and a bit absurd, so it takes little time to expose itself. What's more, I am different myself than I am on waking. I have more problems with critical thinking and strict reasoning, I can't perform solid mathematical operations, my handwriting is sloppier, I am more naïve and prone to suggestion, I'm less timid and more talkative with unknown people.
It is really obvious to me when I am dreaming and when I am not.