Troubles with FAs

Only recently have I been successful in identifying all of my FAs. I am now able to distinguish between a true awakening and an FA most of the time. However, I haven't been able to make anything happen out of the blackness that results from an FA. As soon as an FA occurs, I simply tell myself that I'm not truly awake and that I'm about to have a LD. That's all good and well, but all that happens is that I remain fully blacked out until I wake up at some point. Any suggestions of what I can do to construct a new dream from this blackness? Thanks.

Good question this is happening to me as well.

Imagining a dream scene works for me.

You can also try to run, fly, or fall out of the darkness.

If you can feel your hands, you can ask the dream for a powerful flashlight and turn it on once you receive it.

You can use your sense of touch and sound to help the dream build around that.

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Originally Posted by dolphin

Imagining a dream scene works for me.

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This is basically what I do but I haven't had any success with that as of yet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dolphin

You can also try to run, fly, or fall out of the darkness.

If you can feel your hands, you can ask the dream for a powerful flashlight and turn it on once you receive it.

You can use your sense of touch and sound to help the dream build around that.

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Interesting ideas, I will try these. Thanks!

What dolphin said!
(imagining works best for me - try to think of that as teleportation. Never tried to run out though, but falling also works)

However for most of my FAs don't start in the void / blackness. They start in a copy of my room and since the nights aren't pitch black here, I just start the dream from there. In this case you can just exit the room into the scene you expect to see.

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Originally Posted by Shansss

Only recently have I been successful in identifying all of my FAs. I am now able to distinguish between a true awakening and an FA most of the time. However, I haven't been able to make anything happen out of the blackness that results from an FA. As soon as an FA occurs, I simply tell myself that I'm not truly awake and that I'm about to have a LD. That's all good and well, but all that happens is that I remain fully blacked out until I wake up at some point. Any suggestions of what I can do to construct a new dream from this blackness? Thanks.

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Hi, how exactly do you distinguish between a FA and a real awakening?

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Originally Posted by ezzolucid

Hi, how exactly do you distinguish between a FA and a real awakening?

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Just become more observant after waking up... do a RC and look around you. I haven't had a "black" FA yet... but normally things are odd around my room or something is different.

If you become more mindful of your awakenings you'll soon learn to spot a false one quickly

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Originally Posted by jzinser

Just become more observant after waking up... do a RC and look around you. I haven't had a "black" FA yet... but normally things are odd around my room or something is different.

If you become more mindful of your awakenings you'll soon learn to spot a false one quickly

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The problem I have is that when I find myself lying there in the middle of the night i do think that I may be in a false awakening but i dont want to move in case it wakes me for real

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Originally Posted by ezzolucid

Hi, how exactly do you distinguish between a FA and a real awakening?

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Hard to put a finger on this exactly, but essentially I've just trained myself to believe it is an FA if everything is black and I'm unsure as to whether I'm awake or not, as opposed to being absolutely sure that I'm awake in a real awakening. This is probably easier for me than most, as I never have FAs where I 'wake up' in my room. Hopefully that helps you :)

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Originally Posted by ezzolucid

The problem I have is that when I find myself lying there in the middle of the night i do think that I may be in a false awakening but i dont want to move in case it wakes me for real

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Hmm, so let me get this straight - you think that it might be a dream, but choose not to move? So how do you expect to get lucid? The whole point of being lucid is to move and do stuff, so to be lucid you must move...
Now, the only two things that determine if you wake up or not are: your state of sleep (which you have no control over); your mental state (which you have full control over). Instead of doubting yourself, you should know that moving won't wake you up if you're in a dream already!

There is a similar problem to this "moving" dilemma - if you're not sure it's a dream, you might not want to move so you can do a DEILD. Well, in this case:
1. Some limited movement shouldn't be a problem for DEILD as long as you don't worry about it being a problem
2. Just do some near-motionless RCs... My favorites, in order of movement required:
a. internal nose plug (holding your breath, try to breath through anyway)
b. visual check (open eyes briefly, how does the room look? is it normal? Maybe open again, and compare if it looks the same as the first time.)
c. try to slightly move your fingers one by one. How many of them can you move? (should be 5 per hand obviously)