Reality testing and dream signs

The secret to lucid dreaming success is to get yourself into the habit of noticing when you are dreaming and when you are not. The way you do this is to train yourself to do reality checks during your waking hours. Reality checks are conscious, deliberate tests that will reveal whether you are awake or dreaming. If you consistently practice reality checks during your waking hours and then one day (or rather one night) you will do a reality check during a dream, when, hopefully, you will spot that you are actually dreaming. This is the moment of ?going lucid', and, after perhaps weeks of hard work, to discover that you are actually lucid dreaming is a wonderful moment.

Try doing reality tests four or five times a day. Ask yourself, 'Am I dreaming now?? A good time to do a reality test is just after something odd happens during your waking hours, the logic being that many odd things happen in dreams, and if you can get into the habit of reality checking right after something unusual happens, then sooner of later you will do a reality test in a dream, and then the dream will reveal itself.

Reality tests not only focus your mind on whether you are awake or dreaming, they also focus your mind on looking for dream signs, signs which give away an experience as a dream. When you do reality tests during the day, consciously look out for dream signs -- any indications which would give away an experience as being a dream. Of course during the day there will be no dream signs, you'll be awake, but your search for dream sign in your waking life will prepare you for an experience where you will think you are awake, but you'll actually discover that you are dreaming.

What sort of dream signs should you look out for?

Watches are good things to focus on, so make sure you wear one during the day. Look hard at the numbers to see if they remain constant or if they change. Do this often enough, and one night in a dream you will stare at your watch and the magic will begin. I am referring of course to the dream phenomenon noted by researchers where text (words or numbers) changes before the dreamer's eyes. This happens in 75% of cases where the text is re-read and in 95% of cases where it is re-read twice. So during the day, train yourself to look at the numbers on your watch, then look away and back again, away and back again. If the numbers on the watch face change then 'no' you are not going mad, the truth is that you are actually dreaming. Re-examining any form of text in a dream is likely to give away the dream since the words will rarely hold their configuration on repeated re-examination. What you just read and understood as a coherent sentence will in most cases morph into nonsense when you re-read it, thereby revealing your experience as a dream, provided, of course, that you have trained yourself to spot this dream sign.

A good idea is to carry a bit of text around with you during the day and look at it regularly. Soon enough you will remember to look at the same text in a dream (your mind will reproduce it) and you'll spot the dream sign as the text breaks up, or changes before your eyes.

Another dream sign to look out for are malfunctioning light switches; try flicking a light switch in a dream and you'll generally find that they do not work to alter the lighting conditions.

Other dream signs will be your abilities. In dreams we are often able to fly, we may be able to pass through walls, or make things around us move. Things around you may also not be as they are in waking life: in dreams you might encounter strangely coloured animals, malfunctioning devices, and you may meet deceased people. In order that you are ready to spot these odd occurrences in a dream, try to imagine such things happening during the day. One such test that works for me is to imagine myself lifting off the ground. I did this several times a day for a few days and sure enough, I remembere