Unable to wake up?

Hello.
I want to discuss something that occured the other night. I've known about lucid dreams for some time now, although I've never actively tried to reach the state of being in one.

I sometimes suffer from nightmares, like most people, and mine are always about the loss of teeth. In my dreams, they will simply become loose, then snap and fall out, one after the other, leaving me with very few left and often with a bleeding mouth. I always panic at this because it both looks and feels very real. I feel the pain and the taste of blood.
Usually I wake up from that feeling of dread alone, but last time I could not. In my panicked state I recalled some tips to check whether you are really asleep or not. This involved turning on/off a light and looking at the sky outside. I found the lamp to function normally and the sky to look as calm and blue as always. This has never happened before. Never.
It lead me to believe this time I really -was- losing my teeth, and that moment of false realisation is something I wouldn't curse my worst enemy with.

I don't recall what woke me up, but when I did I was both amazed and horrified that the lamp and sky trick had failed on me. Is this a common occurence? What else can you do when it simply doesn't work?

Welcome to DreamViews.

Lamps often don't work in dreams, but this is not always the case. Sometimes lamps will work just fine in a dream.

I haven't heard of looking at the sky as a reality check before, but I suggest you use a few more reliable reality checks. The most reliable one is pinching your nose to see if you can still breathe through it. If you can still breathe, then you are dreaming. Another reality check you can do is looking at your hands to see if they look normal. Your hands will often look different in dreams. I prefer to use reality checks like these, so I don't have to look for a light switch or a window. You can just perform them wherever you are.

For a list of common reality checks, I suggest you read through the Reality Check Tutorial.

I also recommend you use at least two reality checks when you suspect you might be dreaming. That way if one doesn't work, you can use the other one to make sure the first one didn't fail.

I highly suggest the nose pich reality check- it should, in theory, always work, and it is great for me. If you have trouble waking up from a dream you want to escape, you could focus on your real life body and try to speed up your breathing from within the dream. I was doing the nose pinch RC in a dream the other night and accidently started breathing faster and it woke me right up.

Thanks for the replies (and so soon!). The nose pinch sounds like a good idea since it can't "fail".
To go outside and look at the sky was more of a 'something you must do in a dream' thing as it is usually very surreal looking. I've caught myself stepping outside and look up, to seeing a very deep blue or purple space, filled not only with stars but strange shapes and objects as well. More often than not it resembles a circuit board, only more feint with 'live' sparks following the pathways. The downside to this is that I can only enjoy it for so long before I wake up, so to find it completely normal this time freaked me out.

So - firstly, the teeth falling out dream is actually one of the most common recorded dreams!

Nextly, there are lots of other reality checks that can be tried. Changing the light doesn't usually work - at all - in dreams. Try looking at your hands, putting a finger on your palm to see if it goes all the way through. Try jumping to see if you float or if you fall normally. Try reading something, looking away, and looking back again to see if it's changed. Try doing the same with digital clocks. Nose pinch reality check works as well, but for me personally, normally just a glance at my oddly bulbous hands will assure me that I am dreaming. Good luck :)

I didn't want to start a new post as I saw three others with a similar theme: Lucid and can't wake up. I too experienced this when one of my dreams continued to play in my mind. I felt like I had someone holding my eyes open with toothpicks and I was forced to watch this movie play out. I even had a headache in the dream and I KNEW I had one IRL too. But my issue is not how to fix it because it will always eventually fix itself - we will wake up. My issue is WHY does this happen? I woke up exhausted and with a headache to boot! The dang dream just kept going and I, like in another post I saw, actually woke up briefly, went back to sleep only to have this same dream pick right up where it left off! It was seamless. So...does anyone know WHY this happens? Thnx

I believe that one effective way to wake from a dream is to just lay down and shut your eyes, were you unable to somehow calm yourself and withdraw your participation?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PolicemanFox

I believe that one effective way to wake from a dream is to just lay down and shut your eyes, were you unable to somehow calm yourself and withdraw your participation?

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In my dream, I did actually lie down and I also fainted. I woke IRL and then fell back to sleep where the darn dream picked right back up. What I'm curious about is 'why' this occurs. It felt as if my brain just wouldn't shut down - like I wasn't really in REM and therefore, when I did wake, I was exhausted! :hrm:

I'm not sure, hopefully somebody will be able to help :)

I find holding my breathe in my dream wakes me up. Since breathing in dreams is linked to.the real world.

But when folks on here have lucid dreams - do you all feel rested when you wake? It seems from what I've read that there is little to no sleep deprivation when lucid. The dream I had where I was very lucid caused severe sleep deprivation. It makes no sense to me. :hrm:

Id say from my accidental experience of hard knocks, an easy peasy way to wake yourself up is concentrate on changing everything around you to something completely different really hard.

It is probably just better to start a new thread, Goldenlight, than to bring up an old thread from a year ago. That way we can see your questions right away before we read old questions from a year ago without realizing it.

Thanks - didn't want to break a 'rule' ya know... ;)