Hey, first time poster, been meaning to make an account for a while, but this time I actually had some stuff to say, so that was the push I needed.
Anyway, my preferred reality check is to hold my nose and try to inhale through it. If you can, you're dreaming. Turns out brains are kinda stupid.
That being said, I rarely use it. As you touched on in your post, lucid dreaming in my experience is pretty high maintenance. You need to always be thinking about while you're awake, and doing reality checks and whatnot, otherwise those moments where you realize you're dreaming are few and far between.
That being said, I think that all the lucid dreaming I've done has made a qualitative change to my dreaming in general. My guess (and it is a total guess) is that subconsciously I always know that I'm dreaming, because in most of my dreams I can accomplish some pretty basic reality warping without going lucid. While I'm dreaming, I just assume that I can do that stuff, even without making the step of realizing why and going lucid.
Also, I've often found lucid dreaming to be frustrating. I've never been able to get a dream as lucid as reality, and a large part of that seems to be my inability to remember things in dreams. If I'm doing something in a dream, but then I get distracted and look away, I usually forget about what I was doing. That's probably worse for me though, because I had trouble focusing all the time. I mean, in real life, reality reminds you of things, whereas in the dream, your brain has to deal with thinking, and also with generating the world around you, and it only has so much processing power.
Another frustration is waking up. I'm not sure what's the cause and what's the effect but often when I go lucid, I feel myself waking up.
Also, just a cool little thing is that I started doing it young, and once I realized that I was doing it, I came up with the term lucid dreaming before I realized that it was a thing. Synchronicity.
Something that I've more or less always been able to do, as far back as I can remember, is to wake myself up. In the dream I close my eyes, then open them with my fingers, and my eyes open in real life. It seems kinda simplistic, and I suppose it is, but I started when I was really young, and so I suppose it's been ingrained in my consciousness.
Anyway, my preferred reality check is to hold my nose and try to inhale through it. If you can, you're dreaming. Turns out brains are kinda stupid.
That being said, I rarely use it. As you touched on in your post, lucid dreaming in my experience is pretty high maintenance. You need to always be thinking about while you're awake, and doing reality checks and whatnot, otherwise those moments where you realize you're dreaming are few and far between.
That being said, I think that all the lucid dreaming I've done has made a qualitative change to my dreaming in general. My guess (and it is a total guess) is that subconsciously I always know that I'm dreaming, because in most of my dreams I can accomplish some pretty basic reality warping without going lucid. While I'm dreaming, I just assume that I can do that stuff, even without making the step of realizing why and going lucid.
Also, I've often found lucid dreaming to be frustrating. I've never been able to get a dream as lucid as reality, and a large part of that seems to be my inability to remember things in dreams. If I'm doing something in a dream, but then I get distracted and look away, I usually forget about what I was doing. That's probably worse for me though, because I had trouble focusing all the time. I mean, in real life, reality reminds you of things, whereas in the dream, your brain has to deal with thinking, and also with generating the world around you, and it only has so much processing power.
Another frustration is waking up. I'm not sure what's the cause and what's the effect but often when I go lucid, I feel myself waking up.
Also, just a cool little thing is that I started doing it young, and once I realized that I was doing it, I came up with the term lucid dreaming before I realized that it was a thing. Synchronicity.
Something that I've more or less always been able to do, as far back as I can remember, is to wake myself up. In the dream I close my eyes, then open them with my fingers, and my eyes open in real life. It seems kinda simplistic, and I suppose it is, but I started when I was really young, and so I suppose it's been ingrained in my consciousness.