What is your reality-checker in your dreams?

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?