Real World Exercises

By: Jerry A. Greene

Making a point of testing your reality at certain key points during your waking-life will increase your chances of having a lucid dream. Since our dreaming-life tends to model our waking-life, you will start to find yourself testing your reality
WHILE YOU ARE DREAMING!

Mechanical Objects Never Work Properly
The first exercise is something that is very simple for you to do, since you most likely look at a clock, or watch, MANY times a day. Because our dreams are usually similar to (modeled after) our waking life, with the patterns and habits of real life being represented in our dreams, this is one that you can start to pay attention to, while awake, immediately and use for reality-testing.

Set it in your mind that whenever you look at a clock (digital works best) that you will look at it, then look away while saying the time to yourself silently, then look back to see if it has changed. Ask yourself if you are dreaming or not. If the time is the same when you look back, or one minute later, then you are obviously still awake. If it isn't, then the chances are that you are in fact dreaming, and it should hit you like a ton of bricks..hey this might be a dream! You may still have to test again, since once you "realize it" the dream world becomes AMAZINGLY clear and starts to feel more real than real life. As stated in "My First Lucid Dream", this is exactly what happened to me and I need to try something else. I chose to fly!

I Can't Read It!
Another thing that is very similar is to look at text, look away, and look back since text never stays the same in a dream. It is always changing, or morphing into something else. It can often get very frustrating when you can't read because it is not staying put. A lot of times this one will slip right past you until a few seconds later when SOMETHING ELSE also goes wierd on you. Your brain may suddenly put two-and-two together and "get it". Since we are always reading things during the day, this can be another easy test to do, but one of the hard things about it (and why it usually passes us right by in a dream) is that we are reading SO MUCH during the day that it is hard to REMEMBER to do reality tests EVERY TIME. Again, since our dreaming-mind is modeled after our waking-mind, you can see how this would go right by you.

I want you to take little bit of time to think about other dream-signs that should have made you realize that you were, in fact, dreaming. As I talked about in "Signals of a Dream", they can be people, places, things, feelings, or situations. If you have the time, write them down, as it will be helpful for you to review them each time you go to bed with the intent of having a lucid dream.