Dream Control as Invocation

[The Cusp]

**I wrote the following as a response in a thread about invocations and the merits of ceremonial or chaotic approaches on an occult related board, but I think it presents a novel spin on dream control. I purposely put this here and not in Beyond Dreaming. Just consider an invocation to be anything you want to do in a dream, like flying or any other ability. I consider ceremony and the lack thereof, what I consider chaos magic, to be opposite sides of the same coin. Each one has it's pros an cons, but understanding the ceremonial will allow you to utilize your short cut chaos versions more efficiently. The advantage of ceremony is consistency and reliability in your results. The disadvantage is that it lacks fluidity. Rely too much on ceremonial spaces and implements and you'll be helpless should find yourself without them. If you rely completely on complex ceremonies for specific tasks, you will inevitably run into a situation you don't have a ceremony prepared for, and you'll have to waste precious time making one. The chaos approach is much more flexible, but you lose a lot of the reliability that ceremony brings, hence more chaotic results. I'm lucky in being a dream mage in that I get to see instant results when I work my craft. To give an example, I'm not a huge Iron Man fan, saw the movies, and thought it would be cool to try the hand blasting thing in a dream. But what do I get when I try it? Spotlights in my hands. How chaoticly random. Now had I been a super fan who religiously bought the new issue every month which is ritualistic behavior, and got all excited reading them, charging that ritual with strong emotional energy, doing the Iron Man hand blasts would have been second nature to me. The other main factor in chaos magic is novelty. In that example of my dream, I ended up with spotlight hands, not what I expected, but still pretty damn cool, so I went with it. I was able to use it because it was fascinating, and being fascinating is drew in more of my attention, increased my focus and drew me into it. When choosing what archetypes to invoke in a dream, I like fool around with a more chaotic approach because I find the randomness hilarious, and then take advantage of novelty when it presents it's self. But when I want to get something done, I rely on the more stable archetypes I've created throughout my life through repetitive (ritualistic or ceremonial) behavior. We all rely on a little bit of both, and learning to mix them is very helpful. You can render any archetype that failed you in chaos mode less chaotic through ritual or ceremony and still the use shorter chaos invocation.