Dream signs: finding your own triggers

A dream sign is something that recurs in your dreams and would be out of place awake. Notice one while dreaming and you have a reason to check whether you are.

Generic lists are nearly useless here. Yours are personal, and you already have the data.

Finding them

Read back through your journal and look for repeats:

• Places: a building that keeps appearing, a road that does not exist, a version of a house with an extra room.
• People: someone who turns up far more often than they do in your life, or someone who has died.
• Situations: an exam you are unprepared for, a phone that will not work, teeth loosening, being unable to speak.
• Impossibilities: flying, breathing underwater, rooms that change while you are in them.

The pattern dashboard and the recurring-groups page do most of this for you: anything that has appeared in three or more of your tagged dreams is already flagged.

Using them

Pick two or three, not a list of twenty. Then, awake, do two things:

1. When you encounter the real-world equivalent, do a reality check. Walk past a school, check whether you are dreaming.
2. Rehearse the association before sleep. "Next time I see the corridor, I will realise I am dreaming." This is the same mechanism MILD uses, aimed at a specific cue instead of a general intention.

Why this one is worth the effort

Of the induction approaches, the cognitive ones have the least weak evidence, and dream signs make a cognitive technique concrete. You are not trying to remember to question reality in general. You are waiting for one specific thing you already know your dreams produce.