DREAM DICTIONARY

Tips On State Testing - Lucid Dreaming

As most people know from firsthand experience, dreamers don't always reason clearly. While wondering whether or not they're dreaming, they sometimes mistakenly decide that they are awake. This could happen to you if you try to test reality in the wrong way. For example, you might conclude in a dream that you couldn't be dreaming because everything seems so solid and vividly real.

Or you might pinch yourself, according to the classical test.

This rarely- and never in my experience-awakens you from your dream, but instead produces the convincing sensation of a pinch!

When dreamers share their realization or suspicion that they are dreaming with their own dream figures, they frequently encounter protests and arguments to the contrary, as in the following example.

One lucid dream was about a former residence I lived at when I was in high school. The house had a garden, which was the nicest feature of the yard. A very close friend of mine was there. As I sat looking at the house with my present-day consciousness I realized that the house, although it seemed intact, had actually been razed about seven years ago.

Yet there it was in front of me, as clear as day. Right away I knew I was in the dream space and turned to my friend and asked him to wake up, that we were in a dream and if only he would realize that, we would be able to go anywhere or do whatever we wanted.

Well, he wouldn't listen to me and he kept saying that it was real and that I had been reading too many Carlos Castaneda books. He told me that instead I shoud read the Gospel, {P.K., Columbus, North Carolina)

The moral here is not to take anyone else's word for it: test your own reality! Trying to fly is a more reliable test used by many lucid dreamers. The easiest way to do this is to hop into the air and attempt to prolong your time off the ground. If you stay airborne for even a split second longer than normal, you can be sure you're dreaming.

Use the same test each time you do a state check. In my experience, the best test is the following: find some writing and read it once (if you can), look away, then reread it, checking to see if it stays the same. Every time. Every time I have tried this in my own lucid dreams the writing has mutated in some way. The words may no longer make sense or the letters may turn into hieroglyphics.

An equally effective state test, if you normally wear a digital watch, is to look at its face twice; in a dream, it will never behave correctly (that is, with the numbers changing in the expected manner) and usually won't show anything that makes sense at all (maybe it is displaying Dream Standard Time). Incidentally, this test only works with digital and not with old-style analog watches, which can sometimes tell dream time quite believably.

Once when I decided to do a state test looked at my watch and found it had been converted to a fairly realistic analog watch; But I didn't rember trading in my digital watch for the Mickey Mouse watch that was on my wrist, so I figured I must be dreaming. Be careful with this test: you might find yourself coming up with some absurd rationalization for why you can't read the correct time, such as " maybe the battery is wearing down" or "the light is too dim to see the face."

In general, if you want to distinguish dreamin g from waking, you need to remember that although dreams can seem as vividly real as waking life, they are much more changeable. In most instances, all you have to do is look around critica, and in a dream you will notice unusual transmutations.

State testing is a way to find out the truth of your situation when you suspect you might be dreaming. As such, you usually will enjoy it as the final step in becoming lucid. With practie, you will find yourself spending less time testing dreamsigns, and instead pas more frequently from suspecting you're dreaing to knwing you're dreaming.

You may discover that anytime you feel the genuine nedd to test reality, this initself is proof enough that you're dreaming, since while awake we almost never seriously wonder if we're really awake.

This is the last word in state testing: Anytime uoy find Waking Up in the Dream World yourself seriously suspecting that you just might be dreaming, you probably are!

Reference: Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D & Howard Rheingold.