After a lot experimentation, I have some thoughts on how this works in practice.
There seems to be a more general control, rather than specific control. Say I wanted to summon a monster with 6 arms, 8 eyes, purple fur, hooves and a tail. It most likely wouldn't work. But I could summon a general monster, and then tweak it's characteristics until becomes like I want.
It also seems to work more reliably when you focus on your goal, but not how you accomplish it. First of all, it's really hard to know where to begin to make something happen. When you have infinite possibilities at your disposal, it's hard to pick just one. By focusing on what you want, the "how" will take care of it's self.
Back in the Real World
I've been keeping an eye out for this process in action in the waking world, and I'm beginning to see it happening more and more. I've been a little shy in practicing this type of dream control in RL, mainly because I feel bad about manipulating people like that.
The other day on the bus, this woman had caught me checking out the girls on the bus. Not wanting to seem like a perv, I figured this would be a good time to reset my attention. So I focused in on the first thing I noticed, the yellow hand bars on the bus. Actually I just focused on the color yellow, zooming in my attention like I do in my dream. Immediately the yellow color became 2-3 times brighter than it was originally. After that I began to see bright yellow everywhere, where I hadn't noticed it before. People wearing yellow outside the bus, yellow on the store fronts, just everywhere. There was so much yellow around me, it no longer seemed real, but dream like. It just didn't seem possible that there would be that much yellow around, it was like a tooth dream gone bad, only I was pulled into a sea of yellow!
One application of this kind of dream control over people I don't feel bad about using, is flirting. I've never been much good at that, but now it's a whole new ball game. Things like how to capture and direct a girl's attention are so much easier now. Before it was like playing a game where I didn't know the rules, now it's like a game of Calvin Ball, where I make up the rules as I go along so that things turn out in my favor.
Another application I not sure I should go through with is at work. My partner at work is hard to get along with. He wasn't in yesterday, and I worked with another guy who's partner didn't show. We were both happy to have a break from the people we work with. Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't switch partners. Using this technique, I could make it happen easily with only a few words here and there, without anyone that I was the one that made it happen. But just because I can change something doesn't mean I should. Would things really improve if I went ahead with it? Asking directly to switch partners would cause a lot of tension at work, and the boss probably wouldn't do it just to spite me. But this subtle approach to change is very tempting.
First off, I want to mention an article I came across (which I can't find at the moment) which supports my dreaming/awake link. It said that the dreaming state persists even while awake. So while you dream, you are just dreaming. But while you are awake, you are awake + dreaming. It would suggest dreaming is the totality of existence. Anyone see anything about that? I've had too many beers to find it right now.
Going back to the notion that your dreams are formed by sum of your attention, where you direct your attention while dreaming has a direct influence. But there is also a residual spillover effect from where you direct your attention in the waking world. This spillover can be from the that day's events, or events deep in your past.
Which raises the question "How much can you pay attention to at once?" Or what is the maximum number of things that it is possible to pay attention to? For an indirect, roundabout answer, I'd like to introduce the notion of The MonkeySphere. The following is a very entertaining article on the subject.
It also sheds some light on the behavior of DCs, and how we view them.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990...keysphere.html
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