The Power of Playing Pretend

**AnotherDreamer** · 02-06-2014 09:46 PM

I've been thinking a lot about the power of playing pretend lately. I started to incorporate it into doing random things in my daily life and I have noticed that by playing pretend, I can get better at doing things in waking life as well as in dreams.

As an example, I was trying to play a difficult song on the piano (Fantasie Impromptu) and I was having a difficult time. I know all the muscle movements and the timings but for some reason it can be very difficult for me when playing at a high tempo. While doing this I wondered if I was dreaming right then and I realized that I wasn't, but I decided to pretend I was anyways. I imagined that my hands turned into super robot hands with master precision and almost immediately I was able to play the piece beautifully. Honestly, I was shocked that it worked that well.

Another instance was when my back was all messed up, so I pretended that it was a dream and I imagined my back straightening out and the muscles all relaxing. After a couple minutes, my back made a huge series of pops all the way up and down and it felt all better, amazing. I wonder what other cool stuff I can use waking-life-lucid-dream-control to do.

**fogelbise** · 02-06-2014 11:40 PM

^^I like this twist on the idea anotherdreamer! I tried it with a skill that I already have and with one that I don't have and it definitely had an improvement on my performance on a skill that I already had (like your piano playing). Your second example I can at least imagine relaxing tensed muscles and finding some moderate relief for pains including headaches. It is like an amped up visualization session. On the OP/original angle, I absolutely agree that it is beneficial to dream control and have also used this type of practice to work on new (to me) dream control aspects in LDs and also found some showing up in regular dreams.

**FryingMan** · 02-07-2014 07:33 AM

Ah, to be able to play Fantasie Impromptu....wonderful, how long have you been playing piano?

**PKJacker** · 02-08-2014 12:42 AM

Funny thing is I've been doing this for a while already, but I've been doing it to combat real life hallucinations than for lucid dreaming.

What I do is always repeat to myself, whatever I see it is in my head, and so is my weapon that I am using to kill it, so the weapon WILL work if I believe in it. Also I say to myself that the object will do what ever damage I want it to because I am applying strength to it through my mind and using my mind to kill the hallucination, and not the actual object.

Another kind of similar thing I do a lot is closing my eyes and trying to completely forget what room I am in, then remake it to whatever I imagine it to be. I honestly never used the method in a lucid dream, but I can't imagine it not working since it should be a lot easier to do in a dream then in real life, even if it doesn't work it still makes for an interesting exercise.

**Baron Samedi** · 10-08-2015 11:01 AM

Originally Posted by PKJacker

Funny thing is I've been doing this for a while already, but I've been doing it to combat real life hallucinations than for lucid dreaming.

What I do is always repeat to myself, whatever I see it is in my head, and so is my weapon that I am using to kill it, so the weapon WILL work if I believe in it. Also I say to myself that the object will do what ever damage I want it to because I am applying strength to it through my mind and using my mind to kill the hallucination, and not the actual object.

Another kind of similar thing I do a lot is closing my eyes and trying to completely forget what room I am in, then remake it to whatever I imagine it to be. I honestly never used the method in a lucid dream, but I can't imagine it not working since it should be a lot easier to do in a dream then in real life, even if it doesn't work it still makes for an interesting exercise.

Can you control your hallucinations and see what you want to? How vivid are they?

**PKJacker** · 11-16-2015 07:24 AM

Can you control your hallucinations and see what you want to? How vivid are they?

I was doing it when I was really little, and had no control over the hallucinations. They were pretty vivid for me, a person who had the rest of the world blurry from bad eyesight and bad quality from heavy visual snow.