Lucid dreams are amazing, but can you also end them while they are happening?

How to end a lucid dream?

You can end a lucid dream by stopping breathing in a lucid dream, die in a dream or by opening your eyes in the lucid dream. It often happens automatically, and often this is an issue for beginners.

End a lucid dream with breathing.

You can end a lucid dream by holding your breath, this works because there is a chance you freak out in the lucid dream, or you are holding your breath in waking state and wakes you up because you had not enough oxygen. Sometimes it will not work, and then you can decide to do it on a different way. You can put your head underwater in the lucid dream, and believe that you can’t breathe, or you can remove oxygen in the dream, or you can even fly to space and believe that you can’t breathe there!

End a lucid dream with dying.

Some people want to experience dying, or wants to end the dream with this method. This can be a scary experience, when you are not sure what is going to happen. The best option would be to jump of a building. Sometimes this doesn’t work, because you believe that you are still alive, then the second option would be amazing, and that is to shoot yourself with a gun, laser or anything related to that. Make it a cool experience, you can even decide to do a fast draw (wiki).

End a lucid dream with your eyes.

This may sound impossible, but you can actually open your eyes in a lucid dream. In research to see if lucid dreaming was real, they measured eye movement of the person lucid dreaming. They had to blink in a rhythm, and it would show on the monitors. You can read all Stephen Laberge researches (ResearchGate).

To end the lucid dream with this technique you only need to open your eyes. This can be difficult, you can try to go to bed in your lucid dream and wake up, but this can cause a false awakening. This is an awakening that looks like real life, but is actually a dream.

Why would you end a lucid dream?

People often ask why people want to end a lucid dream, and there are enough reasons to. The more experience lucid dreamer often tries to complete a lucid dreaming goal, and then directly end the lucid dream to write it down, and go again for another lucid dreaming goal. The other reason could be that the person is scared something bad will happen and want to end experience before this happens.

Sometimes people want to practice a lucid dreaming technique such as Dream-Exit Induced Lucid Dreaming (DEILD), and want to end a lucid dream a couple of times to practice DEILD. This is a great way to practice that technique, because you may be able to use it more consistent.

What can happen after you end a lucid dream?

You can experience a false awakening, or sleep paralysis when you try to wake up from a lucid dream. This often only happens, when you interrupt sleep with force.

A false awakening is an awakening that looks exactly like real life, but actually is a lucid dream. This can be sometimes confusing, because you may write in your dream journal and when you actually wake up it is not inside your dream journal.

A sleep paralysis is when you wake up you are in the between state of awake and sleep, and you probably would experience a body paralysis. This is where you are unable to move your body. This may sound scary, but it can be interrupted easily, and it is an amazing experience. You may have hallucinations in this state, this means you can see stuff that is not there.

Final thoughts

Ending a lucid dream is easy, and you probably will succeed the first time you try it. Ending lucid dreams can have benefits when you are practicing lucid dreaming techniques or when you want to write down your dreams, or to start a new dream goal.