A tip on preventing awakening.
A small technique I discovered that can prevent you from fully waking up from a lucid dream when it starts to fade.
If you have had a WILD before you may recognize what I am about to refer to.
When you are on the boarder of sleep, does your imagination ever get really vivid? It continues to get more and more vivid until it replaces any sensation of your waking surroundings and becomes a dream?
Well the same thing happens but in reverse order when you start to wake up from a lucid dream. The dream will get less and less real until it just becomes imagination, and soon you can feel your body again and wake up.
When you are at this stage, and the dream has all but faded and you are only left with a vivid imagination- similar to a clear day dream - don't give up. Continue to engage your imagination of what was just the dream in any way you can. Imagine yourself touching your surroundings, moving around, interacting physically in any way you can.
This will keep your focus away from your bed and your body and anchor it back in the dream, and rather quickly the dream will re-stabilize and come back to its original intensity.
I know it is said that when your dream begins to fade that you should move around and engage it a lot, IE: the spinning technique; but my point here is that even when you are left with only the faintest hazy image of the dream that it is not too late. As long as your focus remains engaged with that hazy image, and you have not fully reconnected with your body, you can cause it to regain intensity until it becomes a dream again.
Picture imagination and dreaming not as separate things, but as gradients of focus for the same thing. The only thing that keeps your imagination from becoming a dream is that you are simultaneously focused on your waking surroundings.
This may be something that many of you already know. I had tried the spinning technique, but I did not realize just how faded the dream could be and yet still be recoverable.
