How do your dreams end

I've been lucid dreaming for well over 20 years, but it has been a LONG time since I have had a lucid dreams over a few minutes. I have focused heavily on dream stabilization. As soon as my dream starts I rub my hands together and start observing and touching objects around me. To rule out getting too excited I have been simply engaging with dream characters in conversation rather than doing anything exciting. I recently had an extremely vivid lucid dream and began talking to a dream character. After about two minutes I found myself in bed without warning. This seems to be a pattern lately. The dreams don't even fade out where I have time to re-stabilize, spin, etc. I wonder if there is a distinction between dreams that fade out and one where you just find yourself instantly in your bed?? I try to induce a DEILD at this point but sometimes I am too awake. I wonder if maybe i am having lucid dreams at the end of my sleep cycle or if perhaps there is no distinction between dreams that fade out and ones that don't. I am not sure if this is a lack of dream control or what I am missing. I really want to get back to having long lucid dreams. I would be happy with even a 10 minute dream. I used to have epic lucid dreams that were an hour long when I was younger.

I don't know if I am disrupting the dream plot by engaging in too much conversation or what the secret is. I see people having regular 30-60 minute dreams and I wonder why i haven't been able to do the same even though I feel completely calm and focus on stabilizing.

Well, my dreams always end rather abruptly. (Lucid or Otherwise). I don't think I have ever had a dream fade out like you describe except with maybe the exception of when I have fallen asleep in a dream.

How many hours are you sleeping normally?
Maybe try changing up your sleep hours if that is possible? Or try an afternoon nap and see if it is easier to stay lucid then?

Probably not much help, but when something isn't working for me I just change things up however I can, instead of keep on making the same mistake and getting the same result.
Hope that helps at least a little :\

I think it has some variation. brain chemistry, how tired you are, and the person can all be a factor in this.

I rarely have my dreams end super-suddenly, Normally, It takes ~10 seconds, and the dream slowly gets darker and the visuals dissolve first, then the audio goes quiet, and finally sense of touch (If I'm holding anything) and orientation (oftentimes I go from standing in the dream world to being awake laying down. This transition can be disorienting.) and I'm awake.

If I'm quick I can sometimes save it and hold on a little longer, but stabilization was never one of my strong points.

Though there have been unique cases where I have been jolted awake by a scary moment in an instant, and there have been times where waking up has taken a full minute or more. I remember being involved in a lucid dream where I decided I wanted to wake up, and it took me at least a minute to fully do so. The dream was fighting to keep me in it.

I tend to have near-instant "ejects" as well: very very fast fades with no chance of catching them. In my very first LD, I recall a slow fade to gray that happened twice. The first time, I did the traditional spin-move and it worked! I stayed in the dream long enough to go running madly a little farther down the path and then the second time the fade occured I couldn't save it.

In my 2nd LD I got to doing something "exciting" ( ;) ) and there was no fade: I just instantly was awake in bed: I called that a "dream eject."

Mostly however there is a very fast fade to "looking at my closed eyelids" with a sort of "tingly" feeling (probably coming out of REM atonia): I have no chance to save it the transition is so fast.

Yes I think it is likely that is related to brain chemistry, the sleep cycle, etc. Most of my lucids fade out slowly unless I intentionally wake myself up which I try to only do if I am in a lucid nightmare and I get trapped in a cycle where a new nightmare is forming (or continuing) no matter what I do. Have you had any really vivid lucids fade out slowly? I wonder if this is a factor as I find that dreams that aren't vivid seem harder to hold on to anyway. Considering that I seem to feel wide awake afterwards I wonder if they are just occurring at the end of my sleep cycle. Regardless though of when they occur or how they are induced (WILD, DILD, etc.) holding on to them for more than a few minutes seems to be a challenge for me. I consider myself a really experienced lucid dreamer (I have had thousands) and yet, I can't seem to master this principle. It is pretty frustrating.

My LDs all tend to edge towards losing lucidity when I wake up. I'm still lucid but usually am fully concentrating on something, uh, stimulating...

One of these days I will go back to simply trying to hold the LD as long as I can. They tend to run reasonably long with high lucidity if I can just avoid certain situations...

I thought before it was stimulating dreams that were waking me up. Maybe because even when I am not doing something stimulating it is in the back of your mind. I am going to keep practicing until I figure out the secret is to breaking that 10 minute mark, but even 10 minute seems like a rare gift lately. I seriously would sit there and do nothing just to accomplish my task. I figured talking to people would be surefire way.

My first thought was, as you mentioned, that it is easier to become lucid as you are nearing waking. *If* you don't have the same level of daytime and nighttime practices that you once did, you may be sort of coasting on past neuroplasticity - neural pathways that have formed (call it years of lucid dreaming experience if you prefer) but pathways that still require the right set of circumstances to fire up and if you aren't doing much in terms of daytime work or nighttime intention setting and/or practices. You may be firing up that old lucid pathway in your brain, that may have been neglected, only when you are close to waking/close to the end of REM.

When I first came back into lucid dreaming in adulthood I would hear about the spinning technique and other techniques and wonder: "But I don't have time or any warning to do anything to save the dream!" It seemed to be with building practices that I started to recognize when the dream might be fading or that the dream would give me the opportunity to extend it by showing signs that seemingly were never there before.

Now once I got to that stage where I was getting decent at extending dreams and "surfing the fade" I only noticed quicker exits and shorter LD's when my practices were slacking off. I am guessing that this was because I wasn't doing enough and was just getting lucid at the end of REM or my self awareness practices were slacking off. Perhaps Sageous can answer this, but self awareness work seems to put you more solidly in the dream and better able to catch tale-tale signs of a fading dream that may just be fading into a false awakening unless you are expecting to fully wake up. Sageous once had a line in an NREM thread about (paraphrased) "not following the normal path to your waking body." That line of his seemed to spark inspiration in me to find a way to hold onto sleep and not expect to end up back in bed. It often involves keeping my dream body moving, often in an interesting or unique motion, despite being in the void or seeing nothing and this would often result in another scene forming slowly not unlike when you enter a WILD or DEILD. It may involve me not giving any nod to the idea of my waking body and instead staying in the "sleeping currents" where I don't feel my waking body at all. It is hard to explain, but I recommend trying it on faith, knowing it is possible even if you don't get it right away. It works best for me when I am at the top of my game.

I hope this helps, even coming from someone that doesn't have the number of lucids that you do but who may be closer to their active lucid dreaming practice.

My day time and night time practices are pretty strong. I practice all day awareness and use MILD and WILD techniques throughout the night. Ironically last night I had about a 30 minute lucid. Woo Hoo! This was only possible by using DEILD two times during the dream, but I was put right back into the same dream (one time it just went to black instantly and the other time it faded quick with no time to do much). Which brings me to another question... I wonder how many people who are having epic length lucid dreams are doing so in one continuous dream or if this is only achieved by using a DEILD approach? I will probably start a separate thread for this.

Perhaps stopping to do stabilization is disrupting the dream narrative and making it end quickly. You could try to continue with the dream plot when lucid and just influence it slightly as you go along. But be warned, I did this for a very long time and it worked (LD's lasted longer) but it got to the point where I never remembered my goal. I would just go with the plot and see where it takes me and do what I feel like in the moment without a goal in mind.

I have always heard the opposite really... that doing stabilization every minute or so is essential for long lucids. I stopped many times to do stabilization but haven't seen a consistent pattern as of yet to say one way or the other. When I was a kid i would have hour long lucids before I even knew what dream stabilization was. Disrupting the narrative is something I have been trying to investigate (i.e.: it's affect on dream stabilization). Often I don't really know what the narrative is. I don't try to change the dream scene in many cases but I am not sure what the dream is really about. I just know I am dreaming right when the dream starts. I wonder if getting in deep conversations with the dream characters disrupts the narrative or what it really means to "disrupt the narrative". If the dream was me running from the police, it would be (somewhat) obvious what the narrative was, but often it would be hard to define what disrupting it actually meant. Last night I dreamed of a party, but what was the narrative? I am not sure... Other than remain the party what could I really do?

I often try to control dream characters through intent so I imagine this or any other type of dream control would be disruptive, but just the fact you are consciously aware creates disruption. I find myself asking dream characters questions to nudge the direction of the dream rather than using pure intent to see if this has any affect on the narrative and subsequent stabilization.

My dreams characters often morph and I am trying to find the connection to this as well.

Ironically I have been having some epic length lucids lately. I am not sure what changed. Maybe the hard work is paying off.

For me most of the time my dreams end with everything slowly going dark and disappearing, transitioning back into my body if I am waking up. When I have lucids however sometimes I feel like I get almost sucked out of the dream if I sorta forget what I am doing there or stop doing stuff and stay stagnant.