Expectations and Dreaming

**DinoSawr** · 04-28-2012 05:02 PM

I recently had my first LD in a long time last night (thanks to the SSILD technique) and I had quite an interesting experience.

After having been dreaming for a long time, I walked into this beautiful courtyard and instantly realized I was dreaming. For about a second, the scene was extremely bright and vivid; however, I freaked out and my vision faded to nothing. In a panic to get my vision back, I began rubbing my hands together intensely. Sure enough, my vision never came back because my thoughts were something on the lines of:

"Cmon! Come back vision! Come back! Why aren't you coming back? Appear! Cmoooooon! It's not working! My vision is gone."

Although I was rubbing my hands intensely, my vision simply did not return because I was trying so hard to bring it back without believing it would.

Suddenly, I realized that I still had my sense of touch (and hearing for that matter). I remembered that I was on some stairs and tried to jump down them. My first attempt was something like this:

*jump*
"Are the stairs still there? I hope they are there. I don't think they are still there."
*lands at the same height I jumped from*

Then it hit me. I remembered that I had read about expectations playing a large role during lucid dreams and decided to try something. Simply knowing that the stairs were still there, I resolved to jump again and land on the next step down.

*jump*
"Now I'm going to land one step down"
*lands one step down*

This fascinated me! All I had to do was expect the stairs to be there in order for them to still exist! This has more or less confirmed (in my mind) Mzzkc's thread about dream control.

In retrospect, if I hadn't tried so hard to get my vision back, but rather had just expected it to return, (in the same way I expected to land one step down) I am positive I could have gotten my vision to return. Unfortunately, I didn't think of this fast enough and became discouraged, allowing the dream to end.

In conclusion:

For those of you that suddenly find yourself in a dream like I did, I would suggest remaining calm and rubbing your hands slowly. This way, even if you freak out like I did and lose your vision, your sense of touch will be still firmly grounded in your dream, and you can calm down and allow your vision to come back.

Hopefully what I have experienced today will help someone else avoid the mistake I made and will lead to longer and more satisfying lucid dreams.

**Sivason** · 04-28-2012 06:03 PM

You are correct of course. Expectations have a massive effect on control. It is hard to expect the dream to do what you want, if you have not become convinced yet, but that is what you need to do. Think of summoning. My latest LD was about shape shifting in a mirror. I was able to instantly find a mirror, because "I Knew" one would be on the wall behind me. I looked and sure enough it was there. Just hoping would not work, I was positive a mirror would be there. I had another dream where I jumped off a very high point planning in diving into water. I 'hoped' it really was water. I caught myself and laughed inside, that "I Knew" it was water, and sure enough.

**The Cusp** · 04-29-2012 06:04 AM

Consider, if you will, that this had nothing at all to do with expectations or belief. What if it was simply what you were focusing on. While you were blind, you were focusing on your lack of vision. Everything requires your attention to exist in dreams. Do you think it's possible that your belief was irrelevant and what was important was what you focused your attention on?

**Mzzkc** · 04-29-2012 07:08 AM

Yeah, dream control is more how you direct and focus your attention than anything else. Contrary to what The Cusp says, I believe expectation plays a big part when it comes to effecting change and facilitating dream formation (e.g. archetypes and schema), but where and what you focus on is the key to controlling that change.

Notice that every time you focused on something missing, it disappeared. Then, when you finally focused on something being right there in front of you, you got the results you wanted.

Forcing expectation or belief is the wrong approach.

**DinoSawr** · 04-29-2012 07:37 PM

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Hmm, I find that really interesting! The only thing I'm sure about is that the times that I failed, I was focusing on failure rather than success. Whether this was me expecting to fail or just putting my attention on failure I don't know. Perhaps when I expected to succeed, I naturally put my attention on it and that is why it worked. Is that what you're positing?

**Mzzkc** · 04-30-2012 09:47 AM

More or less. Though the real focus was put on 'disappearing' and 'landing' more-so than failing and succeeding, which are generally more abstract concepts that don't lend well to reliable association branching.

The distinction becomes more important when doing complex tasks.

The Cusp explains all this stuff quite nicely in his Nature of Dream Control guide. I suggest you give it a quick read, even if you've already done so in the past.