How To Tell If You’re Dreaming

Dreams. No, not the (in)famous YouTuber. The state of mind most people on Earth go into when sleeping at night. Often hard to remember and even forgotten upon waking up, they’re nonetheless frequently vivid at night. So vivid that it might be hard to detect whether the events one feels they’re experiencing are true or not.

When it comes to good dreams, it may be disappointing to discover they never happened once you wake up. By contrast, it’s typically relieving to awaken from a horrific nightmare. Either way, all dreams do have to come to an end. We have to wake up and go through our actual lives, where we interact with real people and get our jobs done.

With all that being said, how does one tell the difference between reality and a mere dream? This article will go over just that.

Also, please note that I cannot fully guarantee you will be able to distinguish between your real life and your dreams all the time before you wake up on your own after reading this article. I am not a trained mental health professional.

That being said, I hope you find this piece of at least some use to you.

Basic Tests

In real life, there are laws of science and physics which movement of any matter has to obey. What goes up must come down. You can’t poke a hole through your hand using just your fingernail. Falling down the stairs can and will hurt.

A simple test one can use to determine the reality of one’s experiences is the mirror test. Try to find a mirror or any other object (camera, phone screen turned off, etc.) you can see yourself clearly in. If you see yourself appearing distorted in some way and don’t typically have vision issues, there’s a good chance that you are just dreaming.

Another type of method you might find useful for finding out whether you’re in a dream or not is attempting to do something supernatural. Can you fly? Can you teleport yourself without having to walk a single step? Are you able to conjure objects out of thin air? Should any of these be the case, welcome to dreamworld.

The checks above do not take into account the presence of reality distorting mental illnesses.

Interpersonal Circumstances

Everyone has a different set of circumstances specific to them. These may include inhabited places, people who are commonly encountered, how much money is possessed, workloads, and so on.

Dreams are under no obligation to accurately represent the real world. As such, day-to-day life details can be completely different in a dream from reality.

For example, you might find yourself on vacation at a tropical island despite being smack in the middle of exam season in real life. Maybe you’re back in university or high school despite already having graduated a long time ago. Perhaps your cruel boss at work who normally treats you with nothing but contempt is suddenly nice to you with no explanation.

Now, these sorts of circumstances on their own might not be enough to determine whether you are dreaming or fully awake. Especially with more subtle ones relating to the behaviours of other people, when your other circumstances are otherwise similar, you may not want to scream “THIS IS A DREAM” at the top of your lungs and sound like a psycho.

However, personal day-to-day life backgrounds can be used in tandem with testing out your world’s physics to distinguish between reality and dreams.

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Life can get crazy sometimes - whether in one’s dreams or in reality. But you don’t have to be stuck panicking if it does.

Any other thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments!

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