The simplest one that I prefer being to just pinch your nose closed and try to breathe through it; if you can't you're awake, and if you can you're dreaming. They also say that if you lean against something in a dream you'll fall through it, and that if you jump straight up you won't fall back down... and that if you look at a piece of text, look away and then look at it again, the text will be different from when you read it the first time (this is all second-hand information, though; I've never been aware enough of my dreams to notice stuff like that).
One thing about dreams that I have read and somewhat personally confirmed is that your mirror-image is different. People say that if you look at yourself in a mirror in a dream you won't see yourself as you actually look, but the way you subconsciously view yourself.
None of this works for me... My dream-self (given I have a self in this dream) very much will feel like they are suffocating if I/she logically should, I have done my fair share of leaning against things, and jumping up in dreams wherein I cannot fly will result in me falling back down... Well, and if the laws of the world are different, my mind will compare them to the dreamworld usual, not the reality's usual. For while I am dreaming, reality does usually not exist (and as such, it doesn't even occur to me I might be dreaming). And as I said before, things in my dreams tend to be not always in accordance to the reality, but they are at least consistent, chronologically and otherwise.
The only (and very far-between) occasions I have caught up on that I am dreaming and have been able to lucid dream at all are those which are indeed very close derivates or real life - somehow it seems that in those specific occasions, unlike at all other times, my mind may try to access my real memories for their similarity instead of the dream-generated ones, and that generates enough disparity for me to catch up on the fact that I am dreaming. - Yeah, two replicas of the same memory for the same body without any memories of dual existence simply don't work for my mind. (Though I was once able to simply wake up from a specific kind of unpleasant dreams, as the occasional tilting (in the way of gravity going haywire? the building I was in itself becoming tilted?) was distinctive enough ... I haven't had anything like that for at least a decade and half, though.)
- From what I know - have experienced, read and heard -, the methods for checking whether you are dreaming tend to
very rarely work, and those that do (or
occasionally do) work vary wildly person by person. For the blind guy I know it is the absence of temperature. For myself it is apparently memories being double without there being also a memory of two selves existing...
The opinions on lucid dreaming tend to vary - from my impression, those who only occasionally do it tend to generally enjoy it, but those who always do it (and in fact naturally dream like that) tend to not like it... They say they can never really immerse themselves anymore, or that it becomes somehow boring (including those of them who can alter things at will, but will still have random things occur)...
- Jack, your coming close to lucid dreamings might actually you having partially woken up, or caused yourself to partially wake up (and then, feeling your body, waking completely up)? At least it sounds more like the times I have been half-asleep (the whole feeling your body and knowing you're dreaming, but also seeing the dream). It actually occurs to me fairly often ... almost always, actually ... when I am falling asleep, at least as often when I am in no particular hurry with waking up , when something disturbs me while I sleep ... sometimes I likewise get too conscious of my body or alternatively just recall something I would have or like to do in reality, sometimes I just drift back to full sleep without the dream that I know is a dream never breaking. I don't even relate these times to the few occasions I've actually lucid dreamed (the awareness of your physical body stays off). But... yeah. I very frequently, if not almost always, start dreaming
before I fall fully asleep (and on those occasions, if I don't like where the dream is going, I can just focus on my physical body, open my eyes, and wake back up).
...I also have the tendency of thinking of whatever I was dealing with before deciding I am too tired and opting to go asleep, analyzing it, trying to find solutions, and it frequently enough happens I end up getting up and continuing working on the thing in the subsequent dream, and making great progress, only to wake up again and realize all my dream-work has had no impact whatsoever on the reality.
My mirror image tends to be simply me in the dreams I look anything like my real self (to think of, I have seen reflections of myself often enough in my dreams...). If the dream-I looks different, then the mirror image will be different, and so forth. It isn't actually what my subconsciousness sees
myself as for my - it is, rather, very distinctly what my current dream-self expects there to be, or alternatively just random. (May be a bit confusing explanation. Also, I doubt my subconsciousness sees me as all the things I've been in dreams...)
- Actually the most common occurrence I intentionally look in mirrors while dreaming is when something has happened to my face right before it (the second-common is while I am apparently a not-too-confident shapeshifter and want to monitor the change I self-induce more closely - I wanted yellow eyes, are my eyes yellow? -, and I have happened upon completely random mirrors fairly often enough - nothing remarkable there). Seems logical enough - get hit in the face with something, go find a mirror and look what happened to it... The last time I remember doing so for this purpose I had actually been partially caught in an explosion-blast, and in addition to being in pain all over, my dream-self's sight in one eye was completely gone as a result, and that of the other, left eye was somewhat blurring. The image that looked back at me? Missing the right eye, with the entire right side heavily damaged, and the left eye largely filled with blood, too... My dream-self was almost completely unfazed, if mildly bothered by the fact that it felt possible that I might lose sight in the left eye, too. Being or looking mutilated has seemingly never particularly bothered my dream-self much, perhaps due to how often it seems to happen. (I know I said I am fairly apathetic towards pain and such anyway, but some of those things? Seriously, having all kinds of mutilations occur to oneself in dreams seems to be one of the most common kinds of nightmare out there, but out of all cases I've been told of, my own dream-self seems to be the only one who barely if at all cares if something like that happens...)
Dreams can indeed be disturbing stuff... And I've more or less concluded that at least in my case they are usually completely pointlessly and without any sense so.
It seems real pain or real injuries never really translate over to dreams or dream-pain to reality in my case... I don't recall my right hand taking any more damage than usually when it has been damaged, or be more susceptible to damage compared to my left, for instance, and my right hand is probably the part of me that has suffered the most over time (bitten by my mother's parents' dog, my little brother hitting scissors halfway through it ... somewhere between those two I also burned it against a pan at my father's parents' home quite badly ... then I managed to get an actual knife right through it because my reflexes do not work properly and if a thing isn't particularly large compared to me, the automatic reaction is to block, rather than dodge)... Yeah. The scars are absent or present depending on dream, though. (Which would be weird, if my dream-self was my own mental image of myself, since I practically do consider those scars part of me ... the earlier two injuries happened early enough in my life for the marks to have been there almost my entire life. It was by those scars that I learned to tell right and left hand apart - I am ambidextrous, so I don't really have a "better" hand.)
Edit: There was something about looking at your hands in general that was also somehow supposed to prove that you're dreaming, but the cousin of mine who brought it up did not remember what it was supposed to be. In any case, it had apparently not been something that was true for her, and the general consensus amongst the people there at that time was that they did not remember anything particularly odd about hands in dreams in general ... no odder than anything else in dreams, anyway.
(I wonder, though, whether a part of your reaction to seeing your hand in the mirror in the dream might have been due to the shock of
discovering that your hand is in that condition? Analogously to how my father's father told me of one time he fell of a bike, did not feel anything significant, got up, then actually looked down at his hands and -
ohshit ... I was reminded of it when I read your description. It was bad enough for his knuckle-bones to have been scraped bare - a fact which was especially visible since his hands did not start bleeding until much later.)
- And yeah, sharp swords are typically sharp enough to cut through paper suspended in air without tearing it - my "sharp" kitchen knives can do it easily enough, I just tried, and my "sharp" kitchen knives are a whole lot duller than my tool-knives -, but not quite razor-sharp (minus the variants were renown for their sharpness) ... that which was shown to me was more demonstration stuff more so than added practicality there.
Notching should more relate to the material, though... The actual sharpened edge itself is rather insignificant under normal circumstances and shouldn't have that much of an effect. (Nor have I noticed it having ... not on my tool-knives, at least, and those tend to take quite a lot of abuse. I turned a high carbon steel knife into shrapnel, once - that was long ago, though. I've since learned that if I
feel a thing will break if I exert it any further, it
will. It is always good idea to trust in what your senses tell you, at least in my case...)
