I did it guys, i found a question the internet could not answer. You ready? I don’t think you are… here goes… What happens at the very end of a dream? This question may seem simple but I have not found one real answer. All I can remember from personal experience is the gradual fading of the dream. So what does happen at the very end? Does the dreamscape explode? Does the entire universe converge into a tiny infinitesimal point? Does a monkey eat your eyes? is it always different or the same? Your reward for pluming the dark recesses of your mind for an answer will be one cookie.
Sweet dreams,
The Quasar
That’s actually a good question. I think that once your dream comes to an end, the section concerning the formation of your dream begins to fire less (neurons), and the activity for the motor/thinking units begin. That’s probably why in the dream the visuals begin to fade to black, cause the neurons stop firing. That’s what I could come up with lol.
I’ll be paying more attention to my dream endings ;D
You get a cookie? All I ever get is reality…
When I wake up, it is usually from an alarm so the dream seems to just stop…no darkness or anything it just stops and I wake up. like I pressed the pause button on a video player or something. I can’t really remember how it is to wake up after a dream ‘ends’
Sometimes it fades gradually, and that’s when WBTB works in re-entering a continuation of the same dream but this time I’m lucid.
Often, though, it just blinks out of experience and into memory. And then my conscious mind starts working like bleach to lose the memories of the dream at all.
When I do a WBTB when there’s a space of that bleach-consciousness, though, or even go back to sleep the same night and have a recurring dream… sometimes, it’s changed as if time had passed there while I was gone. So, I conjecture that on some level the dream doesn’t really end, it just enters wibbly-wobbly time where it either freezes or flows, depending on how well you’re processing what the dreams symbolize in waking life, and its our perception that floods it out or blacks it out or fades it out or whatever.
So dreams never really end then? Is it possible to just keep being lucid all the way through the night? Does the dream really just decay into hypnogogia? it appears you’ve raised a few more questions, The hunt is still on folks!
Also, has anyone actually experienced the end of a dream or is that not possible.
As far as the end goes, really, I’ve had a few dreams where the story comes to a conclusion and i wake up.
Kindof like this one:
[community.ld4all.com/t/loahs-realm-dream-journal/38035/12)
On a subconscious level, I believe that the dream continues-- as I mentioned, the events by which it continues might depend on how well a person is processing what the dreams symbolize, processing it in their waking life.
I’ve had a dream that felt like I was able to maintain lucidity through “the black” (periods of non-dreaming sleep, between REM stage), so I believe that it’s possible to keep being lucid all the way. Also, when “the black” ended, I was continuing the same dream in the same setting.
Another time, I was lucid up until (in my memory) I suddenly was not lucid, and I was in another dream setting-- so, perhaps the dream dissolved into “the black” and so did my working memory in the dream. I was able to regain lucidity in that second setting, and remember the previous dream setting that I had lost.
The dream can be gradually or abruptly interrupted by sensory input from the waking world. The mental “clay” for dreams is the same as the one that models our perception of the waking world. Once the REM stage ends and we wake up, that mental clay is no longer free to express itself under the rule of the subconscious because it has been assigned a new task: the one of interpreting the signals from the sensory organs that tell us what is going on in reality.
A cookie to all those who helped the quasar to understand this problem 
The quasar thanks you for your contribution to his brain.
(P.S. Looks like you will have to share, he kind of came along with the cookie.)
this reminds me of an odd dream ending i had i was in a swimming pool and someone dunked my head under the water and when i came back out of the water i still couldn’t breathe then i woke up