The Galactic Question Center

Waking up suddenly.
 

Ascertain whether or not you are receiving a hot coffee rub-down in the pleasure pits of Spandex V?

Throw yourself at the ground and miss?

Observe whether the vignette you are participating in is in accordance to your "normal" existance?
 

Try to fly
 

From my personal experience, my mind likes to automatically accept what's happening in my dream as reality. If I can't question that, then I won't know. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. Having the ability to determine whether or not I'm dreaming seems to come about randomly.
 

I wake up more often than not with no idea where I am. I have a sense of panic. I try to orient myself with the bedroom window and door to figure out if I'm awake, if I'm home. In my dreams the laws of physics are consistently broken.
 

I don't anymore.
 

Somebody advised me the other day to make a habit of turning every light switch I see on and off (or off and on). Apparently, you can't alter the amount of light in your dreams, so you should be able to tell you're dreaming from the fact that the lightswitches don't work.
 

I don't know. My dreams seem very real until I wake up. Even then, I sometimes have an eerie feeling that my dreams are tied up in reality.
 

Once I dreamt I was hearing a low-pitched, grinding, buzzing sort of sound. I walked around my house, and thought it odd that whatever room I was in, I could heard the sound nearby. I started to wonder if I was dreaming and the sound was coming from the real world. To find out, I tried to do something physically impossible: conjure up something or someone out of thin air. Suddenly my wife's boss was standing before me in the kitchen, wearing an apron and cooking. That pretty much answered the question. I woke up, and the sound was my wife snoring.
 

Pinch Pamela Anderson and see if she disappears.
 

wow polygonwrangler, someones been reading a little to much douglas adams. I simply take a card out of my pocket, read the phrase "am I awake?" turn the card over, think about that question a bit, and then turn the card back over to see if it still says the same thing. Often if i am dreaming it will call me a num-bum.
 

Look at your hands when you are awake and study them, notice how they stay the same and do not change. Do this a few times a day and create a habit of it. Then you may think to do this when you are dreaming and will discover that you have six fingers,or scales or tatoos that weren't there before.Ya gotta be sharp!
 

Close your 'eyes'. Sometimes this switches the dream entirely. But sometimes you wake up. Which brings us back to amanda's first comment.
 

I many times wake up not knowing where I am or if its day or night.When that happens, I'm first searching for those two answers.
Otherwise, if it was stupid, wierd, absurd, fearful, or violent, I know immediately it was A DREAM.