My dream is lying to me - how to stabilise?

[ThePerson]

I have had a lucid this morning that I thought was a little strange. I felt like I was going to wake up the whole time and it didn't last very long, however, I noticed that some aspects of the dream were very vivid, even though the whole time I felt like it wasn't. I ate some medicine in the dream and I could taste a very gross taste very vividly, and it even burnt my mouth. It's almost like only the visual aspect was fading, but I felt like I was waking up. I had a pretty vivid false awakening straight after too. Basically, I think that I am only dreaming about the dream fading away, if that makes sense. It's like I am expecting to wake up. I tried to stabilise but nothing was really working. The vivid false awakening straight after kinda makes me think that it wasn't really the actual dream that was fading, but just me feeling like it was. How do I stabilise this type of dream? I just found it very strange. I think I actually am able to spend more time in the dream if I just focus on getting the dream goal done instead of thinking about stabilising it. Have any of you experienced something like that?

[Venryx]

Yeah, I've found that frequently my lucid dream "starts fading", but in fact, most of those times I just "wake" into a false awakening. Thus, my "dreaming state" is not actually fading -- my brain is just expecting wake-up so makes a fake wake-up experience within the dream. Agreed, it is difficult to counter. For me, I always just make sure to catch those many false awakenings by always doing a reality check afterward. (which I usually do, and it usually succeeds -- it just means I lose the dream context, which is annoying but okay at this stage since I'm mostly just trying to learn skills right now)

[Sensei]

Can you stabilize an already stable dream? If a dream starts fading, I just calm down and prepare for a deild while still doing what I was doing before. Generally it doesn't even happen, because I am no longer worried about waking. Even if I wake, I can deild, so no need to worry.