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?

I’ve never been able to submerge into the depths of water. I even dreamed about my mother falling through a trapdoor attached to the seabed and I couldn’t do anything about it. I can swim and walk on it but I can’t immerse myself into it.

At one point you could realize that you are a dream figure in another person's dream. The advantage of meeting others in the dream state is that one of them may present you to yourself.

Painting by Alex Grey

Have you ever heard about dream yoga or milam? The practice of dream yoga is one of falling asleep with awareness, aka lucid dreaming. It is interesting how we use that term ‘falling asleep’. One does not creep asleep, or climb asleep or jump asleep – one falls asleep. I always find language interesting, because it often talks about our experience that is hidden in the words at some level. Ultimately, finding common - but hidden - expirences/meaning/symbols in our dreams is the purpose of this community.

The picture is a fresco from the gallery of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence. It depicts Charon's boat, the sleep of Night and Morpheus by Luca Giordano (1684–1686)