Hello dreamviews community,

This is my first post here though I am a fairly experienced lucid dreamer.

I've had half a dozen or so 'extended' lucid dreams thus far, in which I managed to maintain my lucidity enough to actually use it. I have also had several dozen dreams where the act of becoming lucid has caused me to awake as I am aware is quite common. I've also experienced quite a few false awakening and one successive chain of false awakenings, which I believe was 4 or 5 (5 or 6 if you consider 'waking reality' to be yet another level of dreaming). Only 2 of these false awakenings, including the succession, occurred following my extended lucid dream experiences, most of my false awakenings involved those times I startled or excited myself into waking, which I attribute to the sheer difference in volume.

Anyways my reason for this post is that there is a common theme in many of my false awakening's yet I can't seem to find any record of others sharing similar experiences anywhere on the web. In every dream which I managed to remain lucid I was alone, that is to say there might have been people near by in some sense but not such they would count as being in my company, they had either left to room or were strangers at some distance. In most of those cases where I am startled into waking it involves the dream character who were in my company, and I'm usual engaged in some form of conversation with them at the time of realizing I am dreaming (My most common triggers are talking about dreaming and lucidity with my dream characters or realizing that I had teleported in the recent past and that if I were awake that I couldn't have done so). Anyways upon realizing that I am dreaming, often with a gray area in which I ask myself the question 'am I dreaming' and am not quite sure one way or the other for a period. Inevitably upon confirming that I am in fact dreaming those dream characters become sort of inanimate, stop talking and for the most part stop moving. At which point, practically without fail there pupils start to grow, and keep growing beyond the size of their eyes (kind of looks like the common image of an extraterrestrial with giant black eyes). Needless to say I find this experience quite unnerving and it is essentially what expels me from the dream. Sometimes there is a brief period, probably before I'm completely sure its a dream, in which I attempt to 'interrogate' the dream character whom I was previously in a conversation with, asking them who or what they are, ect. So basically my question is if anyone else has had or heard of anything similar to this? Even if you have not I'm still interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. Last night I had my most recent episode of this and it's starting to really annoy me.

Now for perhaps the strangest part. In what was, as far as I have been able to so far discern anyhow, ordinary waking experience, I have mentioned this to quite a few people I know and usually just received a response of people saying 'interesting but I've never experienced that' and the topic is just kind of dropped. Twice however I had more notable experience, the first and most striking of these involve my mentioning exactly what I have been talking about to my uncle, to which he gave no verbal response but just looked at me in a way in which he was clearly trying to make his eyes as big a big as possible, though in a quite natural way that people do when stretching the muscles of their face. I took this as some sign that he did know what I was talking about and had, had such an experience. Though I didn't push the topic and I sort of regret this, I'm still not quite sure if I was dreaming or not, but so far as my memories go, this memory is as fully integrated into my 'waking life' as any and more vivid than most. I also had a similar experience more recently with my brother, whom I was in the process of leaving so it was brief, and this one might be explained away in some sense as he had a nasal cold at the time and was clearly stretching his face in this similar fashion in some attempt to alleviate the discomfort thereof, however I didn't notice this behavior at all really until the topic came up, which is odd. I'm pretty convinced what we call being awake is just dreaming, but I think in these cases I might have been on the verge of confirming this in such a way as to remove the 'pretty' part, and if I do that I'm not really sure what will happen, I think I may wake up and in a way I'm holding onto this dream or not ready to leave it.

Anyways I know this was long so thanks for the time of anyone who read all the way to the end. I hope you found it at least somewhat interesting if not fully enjoyable. Let me know what you think.