"Yanking" myself back into a lucid dream

I had a pretty amazing experience the other night and wanted to share it.

My lucid dreams are always very short, as soon as I become lucid I wake up shortly after. It feels like I'm not very "deep" into the dream if that makes any sense. The other night, I became lucid. I was in a room of my house, I looked at my hands and realized I was dreaming. I then walked around the room for a bit, and as usual, I began waking up very quickly.

Whenever I start waking up from a dream, it looks sort of like a closing portal. My vision starts closing from the outside towards a center point. Sort of like how the old looney tunes shows would close on a character at the end of an episode.

So I started to wake up, but I was getting frustrated because all my dreams are so short. What I did was grab on to the sides of this "portal" and pulled myself back into the dream as I was waking. And it worked! I was back into the dream, although not for very long. I then woke up and was astonished.

Haha, nice one! I've been through similar struggles. There is a concept called an expectation loop (or something like that). Basically, if you're used to something happening (or not happening) all the time in dreams, your brain keeps making it occur that way. So, if you expect a lucid dream to fade, your brain will simulate that, even if it is a false awakening. One solution to that is reframing. In this case you could pretend that the dream is a VR simulation moving to a loading screen, rather than waking up. Daniel Love talks about this stuff a lot on his channel.

Of course it is also possible that your body is actually just ready to wake. In that case there isn't a ton we can do about it. But in my case, the wake-ups are more often false awakenings.