Just read this. (Reality Checks)

I dont know where to put this, but I had this dream before I woke up. I did TWO RCs (through the wall) and they didn’t work. It has worked before and I’m just wondering if this has ever happened to someone else and how I might overcome it so it doesn’t happen again?

Title edited for clarification :tardis:

RCs can fail in dreams. It’s not an impossibility. That’s why I usually stick with the nose RC. That one always works for me. If you really like your RC, I’d make sure you’re really focusing on getting the wall to warp or your hand to phase through it or whatever you do. I can do RCs that work and continue on normally in the dream because I wasn’t focused enough sometimes.

Similar to what ZRVera said, whether an RC fails or succeeds is entirely based upon your expectations. With a check like trying to go through a wall, you have to fully expect it to work, even when you do it while awake. Dreams are based on RL experiences, and your experience most likely does not include walls bending to your will. That is why it is so important that the expectation is there.

Other RC’s like putting a finger through your palm of plugging your nose are nice because they are convenient and many dreamers have shown them to be reliable. It’s also much less odd looking when you attempt them in RL than trying to put a hand through a wall. But don’t limit yourself to just one. Find a set of several RC’s that you like and practice them frequently.

You have to be careful with RCs that involve actively altering the dreamworld. I’ve had more than one dream where I’ve been 95% sure I’m dreaming and then try to alter the dreamworld by warping the wall or something of that like, but couldn’t. There was one such dream where after experiencing a false awakening, I began to realize that I was dreaming, so I tried to collapse the room around me and couldn’t. I became frustrated, because I was sure that I was dreaming, but it wasn’t until I looked at some text that happened to be on the wall and did the writing RC that I finally became lucid and was able to collapse the room.

Point is, as Rhewin said, even if you are 99% sure that you are dreaming (and even if at the time it feels like you’re 100% sure), that 1% is all your mind needs to keep convincing itself that you may not be dreaming, and thus prevent you from warping that wall. That’s why RCs that rely on noticing errors that naturally occur in dreams are more reliable (like the nose, writing, and time test), because then all you need to do is notice that something’s wrong rather than having to try to change something only through thought. In the end, it all comes down to what works best for you, but I’m just speaking from my own personal experience.

Thanks! I am going to start the nose plugging. The thing that was weird about this dream was this gorl said to me, “How don’t you know you aren’t dreaming right now?” And I said “Cause if I was dreaming, my hand would go through this wall right now.” And it didn’t work. The I tried putting my had through a table in the SAME dream.