Thread: How to wake up from a lucid dream

There are a lot of ways to wake up from a lucid dream. Try to use your imagination (shoot yourself in the head, stab yourself at the back, jump off a cliff, etc). But if I were you, I would cherish the moment and do the exact opposite: prolong my lucid dream and try to prevent myself from inevitably waking up.

If you really want to wake up from a LD then the most fun way seems to be to kill yourself. You can get creative and enjoy yourself while doing this since you can easily block out pain in LDs, just be sure to preform a RC afterwards since deaths in dreams can often lead to FAs. However, if you don't feel like killing yourself or just don't think you should then one way that I do it is to close my eyes as tightly as possible. I then imagine myself laying in my bed and open my eyes as hard and fast as I can. This hasn't failed me yet and was my natural reaction to these recurring nightmares I had as a child (they made me lucid which helped me later on when I decided to learn how to have them). You just have to be sure you really try to imagine yourself in your bed including the sensation of lying down, the feel of your covers, the smell of your room (or wherever you're sleeping), and your surroundings. Very similar to if you were trying to teleport somewhere in a dream.

Just be sure to preform a RC or two after you try either of these so you can catch any false awakenings. I agree with Weakamon on this though, why would you want to end a LD?

Killing yourself is definitely something to try! But, I find that it's really dependent on how grounded you are in the dream. I think the simplest method of waking up is to just forget all about the dream and fall asleep, envisioning yourself falling into nothingness. If there's no sensation, there can't be a dream because the dream needs your mental attention to continue on! :]

You can just say; I want to wake up. I had a DILD and it was very long and I got tired so I just wanted to stop, I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I did it for real and was awake.
It also worked in a normal dream, it got really scary and I thought; I don't like this and I want to wake up and I did.

There are a bunch of different ways to try and wake up!

-Start to blink really fast
-Fly really fast, run really fast, just go fast
-Shout "I WANT TO WAKE UP"
-Kill yourself in the dream
-Hold your breath
-Try to fly out of the dream
-Keep your eyes closed

There are many different ways...you just have to get creative

Basically everyone else has suggested something to do within the dream.. If I really want to wake up, I'd just focus on my waking body. I mean, why not? It's there and I want to wake up - time to let my senses disengage from the dream and back into it.

Oddly, the way your physiological dreaming systems are wired, it turns out that the harder you try to wake up within a dream, the harder your body works to keep you asleep. This includes doing things like killing yourself -- which to me seems a curious thing to do, both because of its violence and because of its basis, I guess, on a slightly twisted interpretation of the Old Wives' Tale that you die in life if you die in a dream (here, you apparently wake up if you die in a dream). So most attempts to wake up mid-dream using dream-body activities will likely not go well; including suicide (especially because suicide does not exist in an LD: if you're lucid, you know damn well that you're not killing yourself at all, so doing so should have no effect on your dream). I know that seems counter-intuitive, but it is true!

That said:

F0rceez is correct. When you are LD'ing, you tend to be fairly close to being awake already. so there is an excellent chance that if you just relax and think about your physical body, you might be able to nudge it into complete wakefulness: If you want to wake up, do things like notice your breathing rhythm, or wiggle your fingers and toes, and then feel your blankets and really remember that you are lying in your bed. That's what I do, and it works every time.

I rarely want to wake up from a lucid, but the simplest way to do is by focusing on your real body, or just fixating your look on something.

I have done this on accident on many occasions when I get lucid. Whenever I close my eyes 99% of the time when I end up waking up