Eric:
I'm not sure what I would share about my specific experiences from the early years; I am not a big fan of sharing specific dreams because it takes forever to relay them (my
short remembered dreams are often thousands of words long) and I have a feeling they'd be fairly dull reading for anyone who is not me. I did write a couple of
novels that were drawn almost fully from those early dreams that I believe defeated the dullness problem, but I doubt you'd want to read an entire book to get a feel for what I was dreaming/thinking about in those days.
However, Sensei reminds me very much of me in those early years, in that many of the things he described are things I also tried back then, so he is sort of reporting my state of mind back then (I hope you don't mind the association, Sensei!). Well, there is one major exception:
LD'ing for me has from the beginning been a tool for developing my mind/consciousness and my spiritual link with reality (man, that sounds like something I actually would have said when I was 20!). I had never intended LD'ing to be an end unto itself, though I do admit that that is exactly what it was straight though my teens and early 20's (about 30 years ago).
Since then, though, my focus really has been on using the unique state of consciousness that is LD'ing to further connect my waking-life mind with my unconscious, and to search for the "more" that I hope is out there and/or in me (more so with each passing year). These days, whenever I manage a high-level LD I generally walk away from anything remotely dreamlike and work on constructing metaphors meant to allow me to conjure transcendental moments and then bring them back to waking-life in a form through which I can understand what was really going on in them.
...Of course, on the frequently occurring days when my self-awareness and memory are not running on all cylinders, I am content to have lucid adventures that range from simply going with the flow (aka, I assume, Free Dreaming) to fooling with given dream scenes and DC's, to simply erasing the dream and installing a more interesting story (letting, again, my dreaming mind do the dream-scene/schematic heavy lifting), to just creating that "nothing" I mentioned above and deeply relaxing... I'm afraid I have left long behind doing the the godlike stuff just for the sake of having godlike control, though.
Finally, and more relevant to the thread, I think I need to mention my opinion about control:
For me, the mechanics of dream control at any level -- from going with the flow, to universal creation, to building transcendental bridges -- is unimportant. If you are fully self-aware in a dream and possess a waking-life level of access to memory, then control, for me at least, is just an afterthought. After all, if you are completely aware that your entire dreamworld is simply "You," then being able to change, create, or develop dream scenes, DC, and dream worlds would seem like a natural skill -- control just happens when you know everything you see is just an extension of your own mind. So, as I think Sensei said somewhere up above, I'm not sure that there really is an "advanced" dream control; only advanced levels of lucidity.
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