Performed reality check... but woke up immediately.

Hello, I should first introduce myself. You can me 'INTJ', I am a student of molecular biology and neuroscience. I am new to lucid dreaming but I already have a very well established dream recall; I can recall at least 3 of my dreams a night. I saw a video on lucid dreaming telling me to keep a dream journal so that I may notice recurring dream signs. First question, what type of patterns am I to be noticing? There doesn't seem to be a distinct pattern in occurrences for which to on the look out.

But now onto my main question:
Last night, I dreamt with a storyline that seemed to suggest a subconscious awareness leading to conscious awareness. To be clear, I dreamt that I must remain calm when performing my reality check or else I would wake up because I knew I must be dreaming. This suggested, to me at least, that I already knew that I was dreaming to some extent. When I performed the reality check (I glanced at my watch, then looked back at it again) I confirmed that I was dreaming. However, as soon as this happened, I lost the dream. I did not wake up fully (everything went black and I could feel that I was just lying in my bed with my eyes closed, and would allow myself to return to sleep). My question is, how can I remain in the dream once I perform the check? It did not seem as if I had enough time to rub my hands to stabilize the dream. Any help will be most gladly appreciated.

Welcome to DreamViews! For dream signs you want to look for recurring characters, situations, objects, feelings, settings, etc. Just anything that shows up across multiple dreams that can help tip you off that your are dreaming or cause you to perform a RC (reality check).

Well, with your first lucid dream, that feeling of "I'm dreaming" can often cause you to wake up. You need to just stay calm and try to avoid thinking about waking up or becoming overly emotional. Once you get some experience under your belt, it will get easier for you to stay in the dream. A lot of lucid dreaming is practice, trial and error, and experience. Just keep working at it and you will be fine.

Also, keep in mind that FAs (false awakenings) are very common with lucid dreams. Try to get into the habit of performing a RC every time you wake up from the dream state. You may not have really woke up. If the dream starts to crash quickly around you, you can always try to perform a DEILD to chain right back into a lucid dream. Take a look at DEILD in the tutorials section of the Wiki if you haven't already. Hope this helped out a bit. Good luck to you and if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Your first few lucid dreams can startle you into waking up. Becoming lucid is a strange feeling. The excitement and confusion can just drop you right out of the dream without even giving yourself time to fight it. With some practice, you should become more used to the feeling, and have more time to react and figure things out.

Like Yoshi said, you can always re-enter the dream. This is risky, because you run the risk of falling asleep and forgetting it ever happened. If the dream is disappointingly short anyways, you don't really have anything to lose.

BRAIN POWER!!!!1!!!! when i have lucid dreams, i know how to change the setting of my dream!! its really fun, but kind of hard :P sry if this comment doesn't help u at all