this. You are going to do the self reflective exercise, where you ask yourself where you are, and then you're going to check. The cool thing is that because the dreaming state and the waking state have neurological differences, right? Like the brain states are different. Half of your brain is kind of dormant when you're asleep versus certain parts that are awakened. You can kind of use this to to do a check. I'm going to go through the correct technique of them, the main state checks you can use. It's important you understand how they work and why they work, and that's how you'll know how to do them, right? So starting with, like, the most obvious and easy one, which is the checking of your hands. This one is still, for me, my favorite, because it's an easy go to it doesn't require anything except hands, which we which we usually have, and how this works is like the hands are so detailed, like, take your hands right now, and just just take a moment to appreciate all the fine lines I can see, every little crack of skin and pore, like there's so much detail, plus the movement right so just like aI really struggled to replicate your hands, your unconscious mind, the left part of the brain is mostly dormant. That's the part that that processes patterns and details. And so when that's sleeping, during dream time, processing hands is really hard. So the first reality check is to take your hands and look at them and just put them out in front of you. Pick a spot that has like a detail, maybe like a little mole, or if you have a ring, a ring, and really look at it like, take if I if I said to you, I'm going to let you look at it for 30 seconds, and then you have to draw every wrinkle like, really look. And then you're going to flip it over, and you're going to flip it back, and you're going to check, is everything exactly the same? You're going to play a very serious spot the difference. Turn it over again, check again. Did anything change? Now, the trick with this, because you're using the detail oriented glitch, right? So you know that half of your brain is kind of dormant, the part that processes detail. The trick here is to focus on detail. If you do this reality kind of state check, and you're just like, Oh yeah, I'm looking at my hands. If you do that, you won't observe in the dream, and you might not get lucid. So whenever you're doing anything that has to do with detail text time, like the clocks, anything that's like detailed oriented processing, the trick is really focusing on the detail. So let's talk about the text. If you're someone who likes to check if you are in waking state or dreaming state by reading something. See if you can find something nearby, even if it's the screen. What you want to do is like, really look at the word and look at it from the perspective of reading it, but also, like, capture it as an image in your mind. Look away and look back and exactly like the hands you're going to see. Did anything change in a dream, because it's really hard for a non lucid mind to replicate text and hold it. It can wiggle. It can change. It'll turn into symbols right the hands. It can morph. You might lose a finger. You might have a claw hand. I'm curious. Everyone has different experiences of what happens with your hands, but the change is quite dramatic, because the brain simply can't make it identical. So you won't be you won't have to, like, find a subtle difference. It's going to be really, really obvious when it happens. So understanding, like any state, check which uses detail, really focus. Take a screenshot in your mind. Look away. Look back. If it changes, you're in the dreaming state. If it stays the same you're probably in the waking state. So that's the first one. Now another one that's really helpful, especially if it's dark, is nose breathing. So this one works on the fact that you know when you're in REM every part of your body is paralyzed, except for your breathing system and your eyes and like some very subtle finger stuff, but mostly your breathing. So you can have, you have a sort of, like, automated breathing system, as well as, like, some control. So this, these are the two areas, like, especially, we do lucid dream studies. If you're getting lucid and you're in a study, you send signals through your eye movements or through your breaths. So when you're in lucid dream, or when you're in a dream, and you're not sure if you're in a dream or you're practicing this during the day, what you can do is, you're gonna do is you're gonna pinch your nose. You can do this now you pinch your nose, and then you're going to keep your mouth shut, and you're going to try and breathe through your nose so and really try, like, really see if you can get it through while blocking it. Now in waking state, nothing's going to happen. You just get a run out of breath pretty quick. But in the dreaming state, what will happen is, at first your body will hold its breath, but then once it sort of hits a point of discomfort, the automatic breathing will kick in. And so in a dream, if you do this, you will be holding your nose, closing your mouth, and then suddenly you'll have the feeling of air coming through. I don't know if you've had that dream where, like, you go underwater, you're like, Oh no, I'm underwater. I can't breathe. And suddenly you're like, oh, I can breathe underwater. That's because you dove under, and your body held its breath in response to it. But then automatic breathing kicks in and suddenly you can breathe out underwater. It's the same thing now, because you're relying on the body's automatic breathing kicking in. The trick with something like this is time, if you just go, No, it didn't work, you're not going to get lucid. So if you're using this one, you need to give your body time for that breathing to kick in. So I always say three breaths, like, three tries, like, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, like, and that'll give your body the chance to do that when you're first starting out and you're and you're playing with state checks. I really advise using the hand one, either this one, or you can try one where you push your hand through your finger through your hand. And if you again in the waking state, probably going to stay like this in a dream, because your propository sort of systems are a little bit misaligned, a little bit like more, I guess, like they're not run with the same degree of accuracy. Often the finger will just go right through the hand. But choosing something simple and working with that and then having it almost like a double. When I when someone's working with something for the first time, I say, try your hands first, and then add this on top of it. That way. You know you're you've got a double back up if you're doing the the waking state track in the dream. Sometimes people, as you're learning, maybe don't get one right. And you go, I woke up. I did. I did the hand thing in my dream, but I didn't really look and I thought I was in waking state. So the note the nose hold was really great, too. It really it is, especially if you're if you're in a dark situation, or you just can't quite seem to get a grip on the detail. Sometimes you require, like, a little bit more lucidity to do that. Now I know Andrew's favorite state check is to jump. So that one's really fun too. Where, if you're just standing and you do a little hop, but you expect to float up. And so if you do that in a dream, often you'll find like, oh, suddenly you're shooting up into the air. The trouble with that is, like, if you're someone who is like, wanting to do state checks while you're on the subway or at work, it's a little more conspicuous, whereas, like, handshake is really easy to do no matter where you are, that's a really, really, really easy one. So that's the kind of the technique behind the state checks, and really, I guess, you know, making sure that you understand the functions of how they're doing it, so you don't just kind of like do them poorly, but the most important piece of this is the state in which you do it. Because I think it's really helpful to think of reality checks and state checks as a scaffold. So we're trying to retrain our minds to a type of awareness and lucidity, and the state checks can help us do that. And what you'll notice is that, at first, they're incredibly helpful. Like state checks are amazing for getting us lucid. They're amazing for confirming lucidity and stabilizing the dream. But for a lot of experienced dreamers, what you'll start to notice is that over time, you will start getting lucid spontaneously. You won't even necessarily have done a state check or anything like that, because the momentum of what you've built in your practice has has really flourished. And so don't be overwhelmed by thinking like, Ah, how am I supposed to do all these things like this is a really cool training wheel that we use that's going to start building this into a natural way of being. But in this as a as your beginning, or as you're really like building your lucid dream amount, if you, if you're not having, like, a few lucid dreams a week, keep using state checks. It's super, super helpful. Now to do them right, you need to really understand that doing it from the correct state is everything thinking back to awakening to this moment. If I'm like, let's say I'm during the day, and I'm like, Okay, I've decided that in order to get lucid, I'm going to do 10 state checks a day. Because if I do 10 of these a day, I know that some point it's I'm going to start doing it in my dreams, just like if you were working all day in office filing things. Soon enough, you'll start having dreams about filing things. Same with this, we're going to carry over. But if I do my state checks like this, I'm like in between the email, okay, cool. Quick text, Okay, quick state check, okay, cool. Now on this, it's a quick state check. It's not going to be nearly as effective as if you marry this practice with the correct perspective of presence, and so why don't you think for a second back to a time in your life where
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