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Reality Check for Lucid Dreaming
This is cool and it really works. Moving across thresholds is crucial to our experience and construction of reality.
From Youtube filmmaker Adam St John:
This video is a supplement for training yourself to do reality checks whenever you walk through doorways. The goal is to habitually perform reality checks whenever you walk through doors or enter rooms. This will help you lucid dream.
On this note, I attended an amazing lecture on the role of thresholds on fear and ritual objects this past Spring at the annual conference of the Anthropology of Consciousness. C. Riley Auge, in her brilliant paper Fears and Apotropaic Agents, discussed how thresholds are by their very nature liminal places for us.
Doorways, for instance, are both safe and unsafe because they are the entries to our private quarters but also the spots that open those safe places to the outside world. A simple observation, but this why “magical” items are found above doorways in just about every culture, to ward off evil and protect the household.
Similiarly, in medieval houses, children’s shoes perform the duty of “witch traps” when they are placed inside chimneys.
Historical archaeologists could take better note of this psychological given; generally they conceptually divide domestic sites they are excavating into “activity zones.” Auge’s research suggests that we should also be looking at what’s in between these zones. Reality check!
In other words, thresholds are charged places. Mind them, in waking life and in dreams. Lucid movement through thresholds - doorways, portals or chimneys - can be a powerful experience when we can remember to do it.
Topics: cognitive archaeology, lucid dreaming |
October 28th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I’ve been doing this exercise for a few days now, and for the first couple of days, nothing happened. In the latest dream, I remember vividly looking at the tops of doorways and saying ‘Reality Check’,lol. (NO, I’m not kidding, and yes it made me laugh when I awoke). The rest of the dream was a bit of a mash-up, but THAT part was very clear. So, yeah the exercise works. I’m going to continue with using it it and see how the lucidity factor changes. Thanks for putting this up there.