Making success more important than failure

[dolphin]

Things require our attention to exist in our dreams. What has our attention in our dreams is whatever is most important to us at that time. Therefore the things that exist in our dreams are the things that are most important to us at that time. Given this, if we tried to control the dream, but failed, our failure would be more important than our success, right? How would we make success more important than failure in order to achieve total control?

[RebelSeven]

I think I need an explanation of what value you are using for "important". How do you conclude failure would be more important?

[dolphin]

By important, I mean of great significance. A failure might be perceived as such a big deal that it becomes more significant than an original intention. For example, if a child requested a cookie before dinner but was told to wait, not getting a cookie now might be of greater significance to them than receiving a cookie later.

[Rodrodrod]

Like most other things this seems to be a matter of awareness and focus. If you do have those and still fail, then maybe it's to do with acceptance of failure for what it is. Acknowledge it but consciously decide that you want to move past it. Sometimes the more you reject something the more prominent it becomes that's what I mean by acceptance, instead of giving in to it and accepting your fate. There's nothing wrong with failure though. It is a requirement for success. I think all of this also applies to waking life.

[Sensei]

Hmmm... This sounds like "The Secret". I do think that stressing about failures is going to make them occur more. Either through incubation or the fact that stress inhibits good rest. It is interesting, but I feel like this hinges on things like "things not being able to exist without attention". I do not agree with this idea, but I think that some dreams do seem to work on this "attention", while others do not. If you practice with that idea in mind, then all your dreams will probably be more like this and you won't be disproved, but that doesn't mean that it is correct. Learning how your dreams work is part of becoming a lucid dreamer, but I keep shifting perspectives, so I feel like my dreams don't settle down ever. They go by different rules each time seemingly. Most nights stick to the same rules, as well as any time I am in Zodra. Attention will make some dreams lose things and shift, but not always, and definitely not in Zodra. In life, if we focus on failures, we usually have troubles with getting past them. If we focus on success, then it will be easier to achieve.

[dolphin]

I'm thinking the key is to approach dream control with optimism.

[Sensei]

I'm thinking the key is to approach dream control with optimism. I do feel like that could be the difference between "natural" dream controllers and people without natural dream control abilities.

[TravisE]

I feel like a lot of my control difficulty probably indeed has to do with my being so used to it occurring that I sort of expect it. Even when I try not to, I tend to anticipate and put my attention on something I attempt not working, especially if it's something I've been trying and failing to do for years in LDs. I often even find myself just tending to work around the limitations or find other goals, just like in waking life, instead of confronting them head-on and knowing that I don't have to settle for the situation I get in a dream. This really bothers me. Some ideas I've been toying with: - Persistently try achieving the goals all the time anyway, knowing that every dream is different and that it might just work this time, regardless of past LDs (being able to fly or at least hover around in the air initially took me a lot of this; and indeed some things do seem to randomly work every once in a blue moon even if they usually don't) - Distract myself with other thoughts, or focus on the desired result so strongly, that I forget about how things often go wrong (it seems that in some LDs I've nearly succeeded, apparently because I somehow forgot about or was not thinking of failure) - If the dream imagery doesn't yield what I want, try ignoring it entirely and playing out a daydream of what I want in my head and focusing just on that; maybe the dream imagery will eventually resync itself to my conscious thoughts (haven't gotten to try this much, but sometimes it seemed to sort of work, other times not so much; also, it feels I could risk losing lucidity doing this if I'm not careful) - Start out small, practice controlling things that I can already do easily, and incrementally branch out to progressively differing forms of it until I gain enough general confidence and expectation to make dream control in a broader sense easier