Thread: Any techniques for waking yourself up from a lucid dream?

Presuming that you have not asked this for wisdom on the importance of staying in the dream, and the multitude of rationales to stay, I will discuss as follows:

There are several ways, and no, it's not such a silly question.
For instance, many lucid dreamers wake themselves prematurely to recall the results of a particular experiment or discovery. In my experience so far, when I have wished to wake up, on some occasions I have intuitively shut my eyes, and simultaneously thought, 'Wake now', whilst I visualize the sense of my body in the bed, and consequently bring attention to the waking state.
Otherwise, it's just a skill of 'feeling oneself dissipate into nothingness'.
Nonetheless, in many instances, the situation may not be so effortless, as often anxiety, or even mere belief of lack of control, permeates our previously blissful state of lucid euphoria. In this circumstance, a common method of destabilizing the dream is staring at any object in the dream. Consequently, it is proposed that this action will disturb the dream state, as is it not designed for such close inspection. A more violent approach, however, is to kill oneself. I strongly advise against ludicrous acts such as shouting various statements along the lines of 'I want to wake up'. The key word is want. Do you really think the dream is going to be cooperative in that regard?

Ultimately, it's important to stay calm. The more you exacerbate your state, the worse the dream will react.

The trick I used to use was to produce, via dream control, the sound of a gunshot, which would wake me up. The first time it occurred to me to use it, I had recently woken up from a non-lucid dream in this way and reasoned that it would probably work for a lucid dream as well. Hearing my own name in a dream is also something that wakes me up every time, so that would have probably also worked. So if there are any sounds that you have reason to believe would wake you up, you could try doing it that way. This also has the advantage of being a fast awakening, which - for me, at least - tends to keep the memories intact. But your mileage may vary.

I intentionally woke up because I didn’t want the dream to get so long I started forgetting parts of it. If you’d be using it to escape from something, though, why not just face whatever it is down? Maybe play with it a bit, try to get a new insight on it? The worst thing that can happen is that you wake up anyway. But if the running goes on long enough, it’s possible that you unconsciously decide to stop having lucid dreams in order to go on avoiding it, and I'm sure you don't want that. There are many ways to think about hostile dream characters, but there does at least seem to be a consensus that escaping from them is not a permanent solution.

I've very, very rarely had a need to awaken myself from lucid sleep on purpose, but the few fairly recent times when I have, my approach was to simply stop paying any sort of attention to the dream and its imagery, stay relaxed, and then attempt to “find” my physical body as I remembered it lying in bed, focusing on that rather than on the dream. On those occasions I had no trouble waking up reasonably quickly.