I would like to know how you guys can exit a bad dream when you know your in a dream. What I do is I crawl in a ball, scream, and shut my eyes extremely tight. Always works! But sometimes for some reason. I enter ANOTHER different dream XD It's funny how that happens.
^Being reality while I'm in the dream that is. While I'm on the topic of waking up though... If I tell myself that I need to wake up at a certain time the night before, I can wake up within a few minutes of that time. Although, I don't always get up then
I always try to get out of a bad dream but it usally doesn't work. When I'm in a bad dream I try to reconise it as a bad dream because unfortunatly I also usally think it's reality.
The more pragmatic people will often land themselves in bad dreams only to realize these things cannot happen and wake up. Of course, you can get the nightmares that can be real. If that happens to me, then I suppose I would just jolt up and be awake. I'm not really sure how I actually land myself out of dreams. This is probably why I'm not a very good lucid dreamer. As soon as I realize I'm in a dream, poof, there goes the awesome.
I always know when i'm in a dream, although usually I don't wake myself up if it's a bad one, I just change what's happening. If I want to wake up though, I open my eyes.
I've known people who can force their bad dream to become a good dream. It's mainly sheer willpower. I do it a bit differently. Usually i'm able to incorporate something silly into the dream.