Thread: Why are false awakenings something only lucid dreamers experience?

They seem to be more common for lucid dreamers. They do happen during regular dreams, too. I get false awakenings any time I try to wake from a lucid dream. It is like I just dream about waking up. As soon as I become afraid I might wake up, I have a dream about waking up.

Before lucid dreaming I suffered from false awakenings so badly that I removed all clocks from my bedroom.

Can you tell me how many lucid dreams you had when you started (the frequency) and how many you have now? If so how did you increase the frequency? How does having clocks influence false awakenings?

Originally Posted by BlackDog

Before lucid dreaming I suffered from false awakenings so badly that I removed all clocks from my bedroom.

So, you need to think about what a FA is. It is being used by LDers to describe something related to our hobby. If you are not lucid, you can not be fooled into loosing lucidity by an FA. In normal dreams it is just a dream about waking up and I think happens often, however many people do not even remember dreams.


As far as frequency, it changes from time to time. Even a very experienced LDers with decades of practice can go a couple weeks between LDs if they are not rying to make them happen. If you work at it and can get 1 a month for the first year, that is not bad at all. after that it may be more like 1 a week.

I have decades in the hobby, and now average about 100 awesome LDs a year, and perhaps 200-250 LDs a year if I count ones that last only a minute or have nothing interesting in them. Yet, if I let up my intent, focus, and effort I will likely go back to about 2 a month.

I'm new to LD but have suffered from FA and sleep paralysis in the past.

It was long before being lucid or even knowing about it. I used to have trouble sleeping. I would get up in the middle of the night repeatedly, look at the clock to see how much sleep I was or wasn't getting. I would be exhausted during the day. After months, maybe longer, I noticed the times weren't quite right. I'd wake up at 2:30 am - 3:30 am, then 11:30 pm - 12:30 am, then 1:00 am - 1:30 am. Something was quite wrong. Finally I figured out that I was dreaming about waking up(FA). Since there was no real way to correct it, I got rid of my clocks and stopped looking at the clock when I woke up. After a while I started sleep a little more through the night. I stopped worrying about how much time I had left in the night to sleep and actually got some.

I only had a FA once in my life, and it was before I even knew about lucid dreaming, but I think lucid dreamers can have more FAs.

Yeah I had many false awakenings before I lucid dreamed.

If you are doing things like WILD or DEILD you have a really high chance of a FA being the dream scene. I also think that after you hear about FAs your mind starts having them more. Most people only hear about them when they are researching LDing. Most people remember 1 dream a night at most. LDers look to maximize that number, so a non LDer might have it and not remember it.

I think that those are all logical, but I really don't know.

Before we started Lucid Dreaming, we most likely didn't pay that much attention to all things related to dreaming. So we took FAs as just another dream within a dream, if we remembered them at all.

But Lucid dreaming makes us think and be aware of our dreams lot more. We start to notice those little micro-awakenings after the REM, we suddenly "have" more dreams, we notice vibrations, sounds, sensations as we fall asleep, that were not there before. Same way we take notice of FAs. Simple because now we know that they exist and what they are.

This is what I propose might be going on. False awakenings can be thought of as our minds tricking us into thinking we're awake when we're not. For this 'trick' to even work, the person must have some desire to be aware that he's dreaming. False Awakenings are like the ultimate prank for the subconscious to play on a lucid dreamer. An overweight person can only be made fun of for being overweight if he's self-conscious about it. If he doesn't care, the bullies will lose interest and won't pick on him. Similarly, our minds will only trick us into thinking we're awake if we're invested in knowing when we're dreaming.

Originally Posted by Dianeva

This is what I propose might be going on. False awakenings can be thought of as our minds tricking us into thinking we're awake when we're not. For this 'trick' to even work, the person must have some desire to be aware that he's dreaming. False Awakenings are like the ultimate prank for the subconscious to play on a lucid dreamer. An overweight person can only be made fun of for being overweight if he's self-conscious about it. If he doesn't care, the bullies will lose interest and won't pick on him. Similarly, our minds will only trick us into thinking we're awake if we're invested in knowing when we're dreaming.

You sir, are bang on the money.
Since I don't have a cookie to give you, have a muffin

They aren't. I had a chain of 8 false awakenings in one go years before I ever got into lucid dreaming.

False awakenings for me have helped so much. I've had them off and on for awhile, but now they actually lead to lucid dreams. Almost every lucid dream I have had was due to a FA. I even had 3 lucids in a row this morning because of them. You kind of learn after awhile what to look out for and your mind kind of becomes...more open (at least from my experience. I suppose that's why so manY LDers have them). My LD's are slowly becoming longer and I know longer get too excited and wake up. I'm slowly learning how to stay focused and calm.

LD's take time to come. I can promise you that if you are patient and continue learning more about the lucid world, they will most likely come more often. I've gone from have 1 VERY short one every few months to 1 longer one ever month or so and now I'm getting more longer ones every month or so. Like I said, this morning I had 3 in a row and I never thought I'd be that lucky LOL. It's kind of a slow process but well worth it in the long run.