Wow, that sure was cool.
I didn´t feel like resurrecting the old Ask the… thread, but I wanted to thank Trigonal Planar for introducing me to the subject and share this with all of you.
I haven´t really been using the reality check consciously, but I do write down my dreams in the morning, so I tend to remember them quite vividly. Going to start on it consciously, now, that´s so cool, I want to do it again!
It was only for a while - I was walking in a house (the dream had been going on for quite a while; I was working at some kind of café plus minding this house, which doubled as a kind of rural museum - you know, one of those old wooden houses, garden, lots of stairs and small passageways). Anyway, I´m on the second floor on a landing, heading towards the stairs, when I started thinking “whew, what kind of dreams do I have?!” or something. Then I stopped and said to myself: “hey, wait a minute. You´re dreaming, you know you´re dreaming - what about lucid dreaming?” And suddenly everything came into focus. I had never noticed how blurry the surroundings are in a normal dream, they sure seem real enough, but it was as if I´d been looking at a painting and it suddenly became three-dimensional. The colours became so vivid and alive - even though it was mostly wood, rather dim light up there, a rickety creaking staircase and wooden floors, the bookshelves in the corner, a room ahead and a passage to the left I had only been dimly aware of previously.
I could see the texture of the wood with all the details, it was glowing in the dust-filtered sunlight from the old window, and I touched the rail, and it felt slightly warm to the touch, and polished by years of use and thousands of hands sliding over it…
It felt more real than reality.
Instead of going down the stairs as I was supposed to, I turned to that passageway on the left to look what was there, and explored around for a while, and then I went down the stairs, I heard them creaking faintly beneath my feet, and all the time I was so light-headed and awed - I never knew it would be like that!
Wow.
Unfortunately, it didn´t last for the whole dream, I slipped back into the “normal” dreaming, and when the old cranky woman who was my employer found me in her room (which I had mistaken for mine) and tried to seduce me with her mathemagics, all I could do to consciously change the situation was to ask the lion to keep her away from me… 
which he did, and I awoke.
But that sure was cool.
The most vivid and real experience ever.
Thanks.
On a related note - there was some discussion in the other thread on reading in dreams. My second dream this night included me standing in front of a pair of loo doors in a really seedy club, waiting for the mayor to convince the cook to give me something to eat (yup, my dreams are quite entertaining… ), and I was studying the writings and graffitis on those doors. And there was a sticker on them, a warning not to be in there for too long lest dealers come along (really seedy place!), and I noticed it was in English and German, and I actually studied that for quite a while, glancing at the mayor and the chef once in a while, and the back, and they were still there, and my translator´s mind was analyzing the different ways of expressing it in those two languages; there was even a specific word I wondered about (typical situation when I´m awake). I can remember the message, some of the words (but not the exact formulation) and the layout.
Normally I don´t even distinguish between languages in a dream, so that was pretty uncommon for me.
