Thread: Aburptly waking during powerful lucidity - caused by REM cycle?

I've worked at lucid dreaming, off and on, for many years now. The desire has come and gone, dependent upon the ups and downs in my waking life. Lately I've had incredible success in initiating lucid dreams, both wake-induced and dream-induced. Certainly I'm not having vast lucid dreams every night, but I can now (usually) eke out something every evening, even if the lucid moments are short-lived.

My question is as stated in my title. Sometimes I can have complete lucidity with very powerful surface control, but after a time I simply wake abruptly, without warning, without a chance to "spin" or look at my hands or do anything. Just BANG! and it's over. Could this be a normal effect of my brain moving away from REM sleep?

An example would be last night. It would've been around 2:00am, about the start of when my better dreaming begins. I had woken but was deliriously sleepy, right on the cusp of sleep. I used WILD and went right into a lucid dream. I was tramping around like I owned the place, enjoying myself as the dream lasted for some time. Then, as I was climbing a sort of gravel hill, I just popped awake without warning. Like usual after this sort of abrupt awakening, it was very hard for me to go back to sleep. Eventually I had to get out of bed, like normal, and do some reading or such, or else I'd never have gotten back to sleep. I had some crazy times afterwards, with false awakenings, false lucidity, etc. But I never got back to that level of control.

I've studied lucid dreaming quite a bit, but I haven't made true study of sleep patterns outside of my own. I'm beginning to believe that these quick boot-outs are simply caused by my brain - and not by my lack of control. Again, I'm usually wide awake after these sorts of boot-outs, and they often happen towards the earlier cycles of my heavy dreaming patterns. Could that mean that my REM cycle was short due to it still being fairly early in the night? and that's what woke me? Can you resist leaving the REM cycle? Or would that be detrimental?

I guess I need to do more studying, but I've found that firsthand experience often trumps what I read, because books/essays are usually written by a single person. Online forums give the gift of many!