OK perhaps some of you may be able to help me out here 
I have noticed that all my dreams have atleast one person from my immediate family or someone that I know really well in them. I mean, without fail…there’ll always be someone in my dream who I’m very close to in reality. My question: do you reckon I could use this as a dreamsign and perform a reality-check eachtime I see these people? Or is it too broad?
Help would be much appreciated
Well I guess that depends how many people you are close to. If we’re talking under ten then I would think that would be a manageable number to work some reality checks with. Depends also how often you see these people during the day. You don’t want to have to do reality checks every five minutes. That could get tedious. 
I can certainly see that becoming tedious, but at least your mind never strays from the topic - even for 5 minutes.
Usually (but not always) a dreamsign is something that you generally only see in a dream. Sure, reality checks can help if you tend to dream about things you see in real life, but it wouldn’t be as easy to use them as a trigger for lucidity.
Still, doing a RC each time you see a close friend will probabaly reward you fairly quickly.
I’m not so sure that I agree with that. I think the most effective way to use reality checks is to find something that you dream about often that you can correlate with waking life. That way you are triggering your reality checks with those things during life… keeping you more alert. I’m not sure if thats clear…
Say one of your most common dreamsigns is zombies. Zombies show up all the time in your dream. So in order to use this effectively you have to keep in mind to do an RC when you see a zombie. Thats fine… if you manage to remember that when you are caught up in the plot of a dream.
HOWEVER, say you dream a lot about driving. You can bridge the two “worlds” by doing a reality check everytime you find yourself climbing behind the wheel of a car while awake… then you are more likely to do it in dreams out of pure habit.
Well, thats my theory anyway. If Anoushka can do reality checks everytime she is with the people she most often dreams about chances are that will be carried over into dreaming.
I agree with you both. In a sense it’s nice to have a reliable dreamsign like this, but doing reality checks each time I see these people would indeed be quite tedious! 
Although it’s not as tough as it sounds: of my 3 immediate family members, one is studying abroad…so the thought of seeing her in a dream might be a cue for a reality-check.
Well, I’ll give it a try and see how it works out. Thanks! 
Well, you could do it this way too… just pick one person that shows up in your dreams with some frequency and RC when you see them. That way you wont do it as much as with all of them… and yet you will still be making that connection between waking and dreaming.
LostBoy:
I agree with your reality check explination, but it seems the word ‘dreamsign’ has been stretched a little bit since it was first created by LaBerge. Originally, the term ‘dreamsign’ meant something that can be identified as a ‘clear intication that you are dreaming.’
This dosn’t mean that it can’t happen in real life, but if it does, then it means something very unusual has just happened and you should probably do a RC. When we talk about performing reality checks whenever a chosen event happens in real life (seeing a friend, drinking water, or whatever) this isn’t actually a dreamsign.
My post was just hinting that perhaps as well as reality checks, it might be helpful to identify an actual dreamsign that can be used just to give someone that much more chance of becoming lucid. This could be something that one of Anoushka’s friends does in a dream yet never does in real life.
I agree that you should try to link events in dreams with real life, since this gives you the chance to perform reality checks while awake and therefore increases your chance of doing them when asleep. But to be honest, a true dreamsign should not be linked to real life. The idea is, anytime you see it, you are almost certainly dreaming.
How often does a bright red light start flashing in front of your eyes when you are NOT wearing a NoveDreamer? Never, which makes this a very useful dreamsign.
Just a few thoughts, feel free to tell me I’m dreaming. 