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.
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.
This is very interesting and something I have not read about before now. It reminds me of another term I recently learned from the Abraham-Hicks material called “segment intending.”
It sounds as if it is the same basic concept in that you define with your deliberate thoughts each physical experience one segment at a time. As in the above example of each time you pass through a door or portal, define with consciousness what specifically you choose to create in that life segment (a life segment might be when I finish my breakfast and then begin to leave my house to drive to work, thus beginning a new life segment.)
Knowing what you want to intend or create is just as important as dismissing that which you do NOT INTEND to create. This helps me with the daily life bombardment of information and other people’s intentions coming into my life and also helps me to be much more creative throughout my day.
I plan to practice this “reality check” in my dreams, thanks for writing about this.
thanks for the stories! this technique is powerful. it takes a while to get it down in waking life (I mean, I must have walked through at least 20 doorways today, all unconsciously) but doors are so common in our lives, eventually it’ll trigger in the dream.