How can you wake yourself up during a nightmare ?

[Cookingcrumble]

I had a nightmare last night , I woke up during the night very upset and when I went back to sleep I went back into the nightmare , the I'd say ending was me walking in on a scene that involved my dad and husband , they had been murdered because of me , and as I looked around the corner I saw a bloodied foot and there feet were bound , instantly I thought in the dream , screw this , this is to extreme in waking up , and I was instantly wide awake ..

I hear a siren deep inside my right ear - always at the really bad part of a nightmare. It starts quiet then very quickly gets louder, and it wakes me up. If I come out of the nightmare fast I can still hear the siren but it then fades away within seconds. I've never told anybody as it seems so weird - but I was fascinated to recently read about a youth who described the exact same experience. I'd never heard anyone mention this before. I'd really love to find out the science (is it science..?) relating to the ways in which people can extricate themselves from a nightmare - or in my case, be removed from it.

I often find I wake up realising how illogical my dream is but I can sometimes prolong the time spent in a dream despite realising it's a dream if that makes sense.

As soon as I realise its a nightmare I start urging myself to wake up, wale up.

I used to force my eyes open.

I can tell when a dream takes a turn for the worse. A kind of “you know this isn’t going to end well”. I get up and walk around the house in hopes I don’t go back to it

Wow that's really interesting , I've never heard of it before , going to have to look that up

I used to lie down in my dream and that would bring me back to a waking state e.g. if something was chasing me I knew that all I had to do was lie on the floor in my dream.

I get these night terrors when I fall asleep where I just snap awake in a cold sweat I know they aren't real but not untill I'm awake but sometimes in a nightmare I do think nah this isn't real n just force myself awake!!

When by dream goes wrong I realise it's a dream ( apparently quite rare) and say...nope don't like the way this is going so either wake up or change the situ

I’ve learned you can’t read in dreams, you can look at something and know what it says but the letters and words aren’t really proper letters.

I’ve trained myself to recognise this in dreams so I know I’m dreaming. I then have the choice to wake myself up or continue on dreaming in a almost lucid dream state.

I suffered chronic nightmares as a child. Due to haunted house but that's another story.

I had to learn how to wake myself up.

In the actual dream I close my eyes really tight and literally will myself to wake up. When I open my eyes, I'm awake.

Thank fuck, because I still get nightmares from time to time and just can'take deal with it so wake up.

If I have a nightmare- once I wake up I go for a wee. Sounds weird but must be a combination of a bright light, a distraction and washing my hands. I go back to sleep peacefully then

Wow, this is so interesting. I can't wake myself up from dreams, it's fascinating that others can.

Very interesting reading. I always have quite vivid dreams and can remember lots of them. I often wake up during nightmares or really sad dreams but it's not from me actively trying to wake myself up.

I used to get a lot of nightmares as a child but luckily they stopped. If it was a bad nightmare, I would look around for something that was not right in my dream - so a vase that's red in real life being blue, something that stood out as not 'real' and that woke me up usually as I knew it was just a dream. I also used to imagine guards on the four corners of my mind before I went to bed and that kept the nightmares away - strange for a young child to do but it worked. As I said, luckily the nightmares stopped!

I wake up when I realise it's a dream, or when something scary, or shocking or painful is about to happen, basically when I'm afraid I seem to wake up,

Normally i wake up in the dream but im still asleep so have to wake up again if that makes sense. I kind of roll myself awake i have rolled off the bed before. Or i wake because i need the toilet other than that im screwed.

As a child, I learnt to get up on a high wall, so the wolves chasing me couldn't get me, and then I could make friends with them. I now know this is a form of lucid dreaming.

I can still control bad dreams like that usually, once I've realised it's not real - though sometimes I have to rerun a scene several times before it will move in a safe way. If I really can't get it to do that, then I need to wake myself up, and that means wake up sufficiently that when I go back to sleep, I don't just fall back into the same nightmare again. And in daylight, I need to look at what is stressing me that much that I am experiencing nightmares.

@mistressdeecee google "exploding head syndrome"
Sounds just like this

Like Tottie I don't wake myself up, I just wake up when my dreams go bad. And like Tissues, getting up and moving around makes it so that I don't go back to the horrible dream when I go back to sleep.

Yes, when really bad. I had a dream last night that ex was trying to murder me. I just couldn't get away, but I knew I was dreaming and made myself wake up before he killed me.

Worst one for a while...

History really...?

Thanks, I'm off to do that right now