Lucid Dreams: How Can You Tell If It’s Real of If You’re Dreaming?

Everyone dreams. Whether you can remember your dreams or not is a different story. This story is about the dreams you try to forget.

To begin with, let me just tell you what a lucid dream is for those of you who don't know yet. In a nutshell, it's a dream that is so real that you think it's actually happening, but the key element in a lucid dream is that you can control them.

Like a diamond, for example. Sometimes you look at a ring and wonder, is that a real diamond or a CZ? Some of the CZs are so beautiful and so perfect that they are hard to tell the difference from the real thing. The same goes for lucid dreams.

In a lucid dream, you can chase away all the monsters, outrun a train, or fly high above the clouds. It's an awareness of the fact that you are in a dream and, better yet, knowing that you can change it and do whatever you want in your dream.

As an avid lucid dreamer myself, I sometimes look forward to these dreams, knowing that it's like a movie and I'm the director, so I can play whatever role I want and change the script as I please. However, even though you can change a dream once you're in it, sometimes it takes a few minutes to realize you are indeed dreaming, and that can be scary.

A bad guy is chasing me? No problem. Either I beat the crap out of him or just fly way up high into the universe where no one can get me.

Feel like going to another country? Just think it, and I'm there. Fly, run, travel, fight, love, sing, dance - the possibilities are endless.

Now here's the tricky part. Sometimes these dreams are so very real that you have absolutely no way of knowing if it's real life or if you're dreaming. That's pretty darn scary. I've woken up screaming in a sweat many nights because it was that scary.

At this point in my dreaming life, I've evolved to the point where my brain has a built-in safety feature, or it's probably just my Angels keeping an eye out for me, and I've devised a way to “test” to see if I'm dreaming or if it's live. What is it? It's a phone.

Getting right to the point, there is no possible way to dial a phone in a lucid dream. Now, this may vary from person to person, and I can't say for sure because I don't know many lucid dreamers to ask them. I do know that it works for me.

In one really bad dream I had, I witnessed a horrible car accident, and to make matters worse, it was somebody that I knew. I didn't know I was dreaming at the time, so I couldn't jump out of the house and magically appear on the road in just enough time to prevent a fatal accident. What was I to do?

Now, this is the first time that this happened, and I'll tell you how it went. Since I was already in the house in my dream, I ran into the kitchen to call an ambulance.

911! 911! 911! Hello? Hello? I know I dialed the number right for poop's sake, it's only three numbers. Why isn't the connection going through? I should have caught on, but I didn't yet.

There was another person in my dream, and I believe it was my Guardian Angel disguised as one of my friends, who said, “Here, why don't you try my cell phone?”

"Great idea," I exclaimed as I grabbed the phone from her hand. A cell phone! 911! 911! 911! Why isn't this phone working? Okay, the light just came on. I just realized that I am in a lucid dream because, and this is important, I couldn't dial out.

No matter who you call, you can't dial out. I've tried dialing my mom once and couldn't remember the number. Really? That number is so embedded in my brain, and I can't remember it now?

I tried calling the police, 911 - just three numbers. Nope. Couldn't do it.

I tried calling the 0 for the operator. Nope, it wouldn't go through. Sometimes it gets through, but the connection breaks or the people on the other end can't understand me. Somehow, the conversations are all screwed up.

Nothing worked. Why? Because it was a dream.

After many variations of lucid dreams and attempts to call out, it finally came to me one day. The phone was the key to knowing if I was dreaming or not. That was a significant discovery that I only made this year after lucid dreaming my entire life. There were many scares to get to where I am today.