Thread: How to wake up from lucid dreams intentionally?

close my dream eyes, feel both sets of eyes and imagine my waking eyes opening.

I've found that simply deciding to wake up is usually enough for me... but the decision must be made calmly!

If you try to force yourself awake, maybe by shaking your head, slapping yourself, shouting, or some other "violent" action that would work quite well in waking-life, you might find it extremely difficult to wake up, or you might even "awaken" into a false awakening, just as asleep as you were before.

I'm not sure of the specific physiological reason for this is, but it seems that heightened energy or emotion in the dream (including getting anxious about needing to wake up) only strengthens the presence of the dream itself, while simultaneously keeping you asleep.

For my part, I have had more than one occasion where I really needed to wake up, and only found myself "waking" into one new dream after another until I finally said "Hell with it," calmed down, and simply waited patiently for the dream to wind itself down (which it invariably did, just a few moments later). Now I simply choose to wake up, and basically ignore the dream while calmly waiting for my body to catch up with my wishes.

Though closing my dream eyes never worked for me (mostly because I can't get past the understanding that I have no dream eyes, so closing them is meaningless to me), Sensei's suggestion seems a good choice for a simple, calm method for gently nudging your body into waking up.

There's any number of indirect methods for me. It used to be that simply closing my eyes in the dream would accidentally wake me up, but thankfully that stopped a long time ago. In my experience, spinning also wakes me up. Any time I try to "brute force" dream control too much the dream gets hazy and ends, and other than that simply willing myself awake usually works (then again I never really try to wake myself up for the most part). Then again, I can break myself out of REM Atonia/Sleep Paralysis too. As far as controlling dreams goes, I can't just make things work, but when it comes to waking myself up or moving while paralyzed I've got as much control as I want pretty much.

The only time I've really had trouble getting things to work was when I had been on a sleep medication that caused me to have a pseudo-dream experience while in REM Atonia, where I was falling through what felt like an indescribably large expanse that somehow formed a sort of tunnel and my speed was increasing at an exponential rate. The expanse was filled with all kinds of psychedelic colors and geometric shapes. This is one of the few REM Atonia/SP experiences I've had that was terrifying, because I wasn't ever leveling off in speed, I just kept speeding up. After about 20 or 30 seconds, the tunnel opened up into another expanse, this time infinitely large (understanding rather than simply seeing its sheer size was also terrifying), also filled with psychedelic colors and geometric shapes that appeared to be like planets of their own, and I was heading into a purple mass below me that I couldn't really describe. At this point things got too heavy and I forced myself out by controlling my real body (which I wasn't aware of but apparently had some control over) and used my left arm to prop my upper torso up, as I was lying face down in bed. It felt like I was ripping myself from my own nerves, where I was magnetically locked in, it was almost painful. I didn't know I was controlling my real body, and woke up propping myself up like that. So, even under bad circumstances where I don't have the usual level of control I do, willing myself to do whatever still seems to work, if a bit poorly.