Practicing dream control outside of lucid dreams?

Hello :) The idea: creating a meditative/fantasy "training place" for lucid skills. Like a "practice" lucid dream, only it is not a dream. It is a meditative state.
Some days ago, I started meditating. I don't know if meditating would be the right word, but I closed my eyes and imagined I was walking around in some fantasy world.
In this world, I did different things I would like to try in lucid dreams. Like mind control and shape shifting..
The day after I started doing this 'meditating' I had a dream where I shape shifted from human to wolf.
Then, some days after, I had a lucid dream (DILD) where I had to use mind control. And from the practicing in the fantasy world, I knew exactly how to do it. It was easy as nothing.
So when the lucid dream comes, you will 'know' the feeling of it, and how you do it, from the practice dojo.
For example: People wanting to grow wings and fly, can close their eyes and imagining growing wings. How if feels when they grow themselves out of the body, they weight of them and the wind in rustling feathers. Then they can imagine they are running off a cliff, flapping their wings. Getting higher and higher.

This will give people confidence in the lucid dream, since they know how it's done. In a world you imagine, you decide everything. So unless you decide to fail, you can't fail.

Summary: Imagining yourself doing things in a fantasy world will make it easier to do in a lucid dream.

Perhaps this is an old idea, but I haven't seen it here before.

I try to be awake in my daily routine to be awake in my dream. (I'm in a basic step for WILD)
I guess you already succeed in WILD to practice those things.
Just before I fall a sleep, I remind myself 'ok I'm going to make a waterball in my dream... at the grassy hill.'
But end of getting unconscious... the waterball never appear ...
I'll try your method (imagining while awake) and see how it turns out.... Thanks

Update me one how it goes ^^ I'm glad someone will give it a shot

That's how I practice everything. I call it "getting muscle memory", like they train you in military, so you can do things without even thinking about them, just automatically.

I have noticed, that when I thought about "turning the lights on" in the lucid by saying "lights", I was just whispering it, because that's how I was practicing it in waking life. So I started to practice by saying it out loud, with conviction, just as I would in a dream. And what do you know, I started yelling commands in my lucids and they worked.

So I started to play out everything in waking life, that I wanted to do in LD. I practice stabilizing by touching my arms, clothes, ground, looking at my body (and first time in a dream ever I saw my body), rubbing my hands and clapping, and lots of yelling of commands like "stabilize", "increase vividnes", "lights". I also practiced throwing fire balls.

So I really see this as something to try, if you having trouble doing things in your lucids. :alien:

This is dream incubation, it's pretty cool you discovered it for yourself and have had success with it. Keep it up and you could have lots of lucid dreams from it, try doing it during WBTB. :)