Is it considered being lucid if I become aware that I am physically waking up? I’m not referring to waking up as a result of becoming lucid; I mean actually realizing “I’m waking up” while still in a dream. Rather than an awareness that I’m dreaming, it’s an awareness that I’m lying in bed and waking up. I’ve had this happen to me twice, both under the same circumstances - waking up in the morning (when it’s light, not before the sun’s up), deciding to stay in bed for awhile, and dozing off again. This usually results in me remembering bizarre fragments of various dreams upon waking up, but I can recall two specific examples of becoming aware that I was physically waking up.
Both times, the dream became “stuck”, in a sense, after realizing this, not frozen, but just… stuck. I’ll get to that. The first time it happened was a few years ago. I was at a dance, and I was dancing with the guy I liked at the time. While I can’t remember most of the dream anymore, I can still remember the waking up part. Now, when I say it became “stuck”, I mean all that happened was the repetitive motion of us dancing - no talking, nothing else happening around us anymore. This happened around the same time as I became physically aware of my body. I mean, I knew I had full control over my physical body in bed if I chose to move. I knew I could open my eyes and wake up. It was like I was watching the dream all of a sudden. I tried desperately to keep my focus in the dream, but it was too late, and it started fading. Well, everything except for the two of us began fading, slowly at first, then quicker, so I made the decision to open my eyes and wake up, realizing that the dream was over by this point.
I had something similar happen this morning. It started out as HI, which I didn’t pay much mind to, as I was already in a semi-conscious, drifting-in-and-out-of-sleep state at the time. Anyway, the details of most of the dream aren’t important, but it basically ended where the helicopter I was in crash-landed. The dream got “stuck” this time when I was lying on the ground, under the wrecked helicopter, and nothing was happening around me. I thought, “Oh, the dream’s over,” and allowed myself to wake up. I didn’t want to wake up, but I remembered how everything had faded last time I’d tried to resist waking up, so I knew I had no choice to simply accept that the dream had ended and I had to wake up.