Fear turned into a reality check

[LiveNobody]

This is something that I've noticed happen a few times, I wanted to share it in case people are struggling to get into lucid dreaming such as myself. Despite doing regular reality checks a few times daily (counting my fingers, pushing my finger onto my palm, closing my nose and trying to breathe through it) I rarely remember to do them whilst dreaming. But something I've noticed is that when a major fear of mine happens in my dream, I instantly realise that I'm in a dream and become lucid. This might not work for everyone depending on what your main 'fear' is, mine is very specific so I'm not sure if it'll work with others.

So a little back story of this particular fear as it might seem kinda silly without an explanation. When I was young my dad would show me these jumpscare videos on Youtube, The Maze Game is the only specific one that I can remember and it scared me to the point of me being 22 now, I still have these nightmares because of this. So after being showed this, and my dad laughing at my reaction, I started having dreams that my TV would turn on by itself and start playing The Maze Game or something else (in one nightmare I distinctly remember the TV turning on and playing the old school Scooby Doo intro, and even though Scooby Doo isn't scary at all, the fact that it was playing by itself freaked me out) and no matter what I did it wouldn't turn off. I'd try using the controller, turn it off by the dvd player even pull out the cables but it wouldn't turn off.

Fast forward a couple years and I still have this fear of the TV turning on (I even sleep with my back to the TV all the time as well, I think it's really gotten to me psychologically) and sometimes it creeps up in my dreams occasionally. But because this fear is so absurd and extremely unlikely to happen in my waking life somehow, I've somehow trained myself to realise that if this does happen that I'm extremely likely to be in a dream and then can become lucid.

This has probably been talked about before, but I wanted to share my experience with this that I have recently discovered. I'm not exactly sure if this will really help anyone, or if it's even an interesting read but I just wanted to share it. If you have some kinda absurd fear that you know will definitely not happen in the waking world and you dream about occasionally, then maybe you could try to turn it into a reality check? Lemme know if this happens to you already, I highly doubt I'm the first one to talk about fears being used as reality checks.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!

[Shaddowpumpkin]

I've done this, my typical method is jumping off a tall building. It's common for people when there falling asleep to sometimes jerk themselves awake. I read somewhere that this may be do to our genetic past, like when we fall out a tree when we're sleeping. So how I use it, is making the choice as it happens to which place I need my entire mind to focus on to safe myself. In a sense I choose to wake up, or wake up in the dream.