Thread: Having a lot of trouble with control

Free your mind!

That's actually in a way what is needed to be done when gaining control. There are several things that can block such control, and that is doubting that you can do it, especially common amongst lucid dream newbies. Also, it is possible to try too hard. If I ever get problems taking control (it happens, even though I've had lucid dreams daily for over 20 years) I just try to relax a bit, remind myself that this is just a dream and that my only limit is my imagination, then I usually regain my control.

It is all about placebo, there are no real methods for any dream control.

If you get into the right state of mind and expect something to work then it will.

Imagine the wind against your head as you rise up, or being really really light. Try and think of it as natural as walking

I find that I have problems flying for two reasons.

Simple reason first: I'm making it too hard. Often I can't fly (or stay up if I'm already flying) when I think about it too hard. It's okay for me to notice how cool it feels, but if I think about the mechanics, I just loose it. If I just relax and accept that I can fly, I float right up.

Hard reason last: I feel out of control in my waking life. I don't mean out of control like "I'm gonna loose it!" I mean feeling like I don't have enough power or control over things in my life. Like if I am overstressed, feeling like people aren't listening to me, etc. I won't be able to fly. This problem is harder to fix, and generally can't be resolved in the dream.

Hope this helped.

I have pretty much perfect dream control; I've done things effortlessly after a handful of lucid dreams (in many cases, first time I tried), which people have struggled to do after hundreds of dreams.

The thing is, is that I know for sure I'm dreaming. I don't have any doubts in the back of my head about if it's really a dream, and I understand what it being a dream means. It means that *I* make the rules.

When I want to fly, I just will myself to do it. I don't imagine a force beneath my feet. I don't invent excuses for why something should work; you don't need to, when you fully understand what's going on.

You need to understand that in your dream, you are the boss. You are not dictated to by anything*. Gravity? Meaningless here.

If you have to invent excuses to get some thing to work, you don't understand what lucid dreaming means at the most fundamental level.

Inventing placebo effects is not helpful in the long run. It will mean constantly coming up with excuses for something to work, and much less time (not to mention failure rates) doing your chosen activity.

Understand it's your dream. You are not dictated to by anything, and you can have as much or little power as you want. Understand this, and control comes naturally.

*Other than your ability to imagine, the power of your mind, and of course REM sleep available, but these are factors outside the dream.

I learned to fly much like the way one learns to hang glide. On a hill. Try finding a hill, spreading your arms and letting them catch the air. Glide down it, then once you are gliding, flap them and get higher.

Flying is all about experience, once you've done it a few times it's second nature, the first couple times you have to take baby steps. Take a look in my lucid dream journal and find the ones in which I try to fly. Notice how my abilities grew slowly over time.

Hmm, I find it very easy to control my dreams. I had my first fully lucid dream about a week ago, and was able to make a girl appear out of no where, along with entering someones house making them remain in their positions not chasing me.

My mindset is, that I don't even care what happens. I basically thought to myself, "ok this is my first lucid so I need to calm down and complete my most wanted goal." Of course I did, by shear force, and it appeared like nothing and no one really bothered me or swayed my confidence in what I could do.

In short, I suppose you just need to have confidence. Maybe thats what helped me, but pretty much everything happened like I wanted. I made a chick appear behind a door, stopped the house owner from chasing me around his house, all by having confidence that they wouldn't bother me. Guess what, no one did. =D

I've never had problems with dream control. On my first WILD, I took to the skies with relative ease. All I did was remember something a DC taught me in a non-LD, and then by literally letting go of all your expectations, fears, and doubts, the feeling you get is one of incredible lightness. All I did was focus on that feeling, whilst lifting my arms out to the side and looking up to the sky. There is no thinking of wanting to fly or trying to fly... you simply just do it. Even when I got the idea to fly, is was said in this context "I'm going to fly...". A definite acknowledgement, and not a try or maybe.

It applies with many things. You may need to get used to it, BUT, nothing is difficult to do. It is only as hard as you think it would be.