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Last night I had a false awakening. I "woke up" in my bed and did a nose plug RC - "Oh, I'm dreaming. Interesting," I thought. The problem was that I could barely see. First thing I did was try to make it morning, but absolutely no control. I got out of bed and tried to turn on the lights but the light switches didn't do anything, as well as my lamp. Eventually the dream faded. I rarely have false awakenings so any tips if this happens again? :D
I'm by no means an expert, but I happened to have this happen two days ago after my first try with SSILD. I had just read someone post that it is risky opening your dream eyes in this scenario before a dream scene forms because you might wake up, and I'd also happened to just read Daniel Love's suggestions about reframing, treating your dream like a Star Trek holodeck.
So once I became lucid and I was in pitch darkness, I avoided opening my eyes, and tried to yell, "Computer, create holodeck." My voice was even hoarse, which is the typical sort of sluggishness I have in FA, but I watched as the white walls came together with four square lights above and was soon standing in a white room with a huge computer monitor. I guarantee you that if I had tried to simply use positive thinking to make this happen, I would have failed, but this whole reframing holodeck idea seems to work really well for me. Of course, I was so excited I forgot to stabalize the dream and it lasted about three minutes, but it was super exciting to see it work.
Hmm thanks for your input! I'll give the commanding thing a try next time. I usually have great thinking and control, but this LD had that sluggishness you were talking about which I have only had happen once before.
I had this happen too several times, your brain doesn't have a dream ready so it just makes the last known location which is your bedroom. I often solve this by basicly walking away from my room and usually the house gets weirder and dreamier the further you're away from your bed.
I almost always have regular False Awakenings when I practice lucid dreaming, but they usually end very quickly and have that dark "sluggishness" to them.
Interestingly though, sometimes they can be as vivid as waking life but with me being half-blind and only being able to use about 40% of my vision.
Anyway, when I get False Awakenings I try to spend time just exploring the surroundings as actively as I can, and try to avoid stressing over when I might wake up.
My longest False Awakening so far has lasted about 10 minutes or so, and that was certainly more than enough to get the dream going.
This used to be a big problem for me! I found many issues with waking up like this in a lucid dream, so now I teleport out of my room any time that I feel hampered by it. Usually through the sleep method. Just lay down and imagine somewhere else. If you wake up, DEILD back. You may think "What if this wakes me up?" and this is a real fear, but I can tell you right now that in the next 10 LDs like this, you might wake up in a couple of them, and you might just lay still and not teleport in a few of them and you might only have one or two that you teleport and go somewhere else, but in the next 10 LDs after that, you will see major improvements. Not just the fact the most of them you will be able to teleport, but the fact that the fear and worry and schema of dark room will be gone and you will have more dreams that you can just pop out of bed and enjoy a nice cup of dream tea while in your dream house. :)
Whenever this happens to me, I feel like I'm trying to force the dream scene too much, I'm still not entirely used to the idea of this being sort of a 'two-person' job, so instead of asking for something, I tend to assume I'm alone and just will stuff into existence, but it's hard to make a scene piece by piece yourself, if not impossible, so the dream ends up all dark and disorienting and eventually just ends. :/
I also have had “dark FAs” on occasion where lights don't work, flashlights don't work, etc. At one point it happened often enough that it would trigger lucidity virtually every time. :) While it no longer happens frequently to me, my trick for dealing with it when it does is simply to ignore the fact that I can't see anything, and just go outside and wander around and try my usual LD stuff the best I can. After simply ignoring the situation for a while and focusing my mind elsewhere, I find things eventually return to normal and I can see again.
This happens to me from time to time.
Sometimes I feel one of my eyes closed, like glued, while everything is dark and blurry. Putting too much effort on opening it results in opening it for real (wake up).
Some other times I open room door (all dark, blurry, and sleepy eyes) and while I'm walking on the hallway I feel as if I was slowly sinking, like feeling tired and going to the floor. It's when I realize I'm dreaming and even if I try to control it, I just wake up.
Other times I know it's a False Awakening but room is really dark, I'll tell you what I do in case it helps your or anyone:
First I try to relax and don't give too much importance to the fact it's dark. My first focus is to try stabilize the dream so I rub my wands or walk to the place I know the wall is, and try to touch it, look at it. As I'm more aware of my dream body and feel a bit more "in the scene", I usually order for "light", not sure if screaming or just thinking, but I ask light, more light, sun light, or whatever, and the few times I did this, it just happened. I also opened the window blind and room went from dark, to light. Some other times going from my room to the living room changes it, because it has light.
Another thing you could try, once dream is more or less stabilized, is to just look at the wall KNOWING it's not really a wall and that it's not really there, and walk throught it. I did this once but unfortunatelly it all went black, and some seconds later I woke up.
But I think the main thing is to not worry too much about darkness as long as you see something, and first stabilize the dream, so you can expect to have some control over it.
Good luck.
Oh yea, FAs can be disturbing some times but i see them as a second or more chance(s) at a LD. I actually try for a FA if i awake from an LD. My favorite method is to find an a digital alarm clock and try to read the time. Without fail the time is horribly scrambled or unreadable and this almost always lanches me to a LD. They might be week where i barely make it out of bed, or imediately flying thorugh the wall and doing crazy shit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hunterkiss