Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.
>Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately.
Most, but not all of my experiences have been similar, although I actually suspect that in at least some cases I have not actually woken up, but have merely dreamt that I woke up. At one point I "woke up" from a lucid dream to find myself in bed in the middle of the night, went back to sleep, and then was awoken moments later by my alarm and found that the sun was fully risen. Not conclusive, as I may have just slept dreamlessly in the interim (although that's uncommon after waking from a dream and going back to sleep), but suspicious.
Another time, I woke up immediately after realizing I was dreaming, looked around my room, and found that my dream had persisted and was visually composited over the real world around me. This was, of course, extremely disconcerting, and my solution was to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But looking back, it seems far more likely that I dreamt that entire experience, including the waking up and looking around, than that my brain actually had that kind of catastrophic system failure.
In any case, losing your grasp on lucid dreams is a common and frustrating problem, and people have gathered a few tricks for holding on. One that has sometimes worked for me is, when I feel things beginning to slip, rather than panicking, to spin gently in place with my eyes closed (although closing your eyes in a dream is not always
> "(although closing your eyes in a dream is not always"
I've been lucid dreaming for a good many years now. Losing visual sensations in a dream typically leads me to waking up. I attribute this to me being a rather visual learner/thinker while awake. Early on I tried the spinning-around trick, but it led to confusing visual-blurs and often me unintentionally sensing my real-body's proprioceptive channel, all leading to waking up.
My best dream-stabilizing trick so far has been to look at my dream hands and use one to scratch the palm of the other. That ties my visual perceptions to my dream-body's tactile sensations. Once I get a dream stabilized like this, I can just keep one hand scratching its own palm all the time, serving as a good, constant reminder that I'm still dreaming.
Or, if I'm flying/hovering, I just crash into something or the ground (the harder the better), also linking the visual to the tactile.
