I've been having this problem for awhile now. I've became conscious in many dreams this past year, but I've had some difficulty controlling them. When I become conscious and start acting on my own, things stop acting normal. People will sometimes go catatonic and stiff as a board. This is usually followed by a darkness that consumes my entire dream, and once I enter the darkness I usually forget that I'm dreaming and either a new dream starts in which I'm unaware, or I just go back to sleeping until the next REM cycle. Sometimes things will get all shaky and unfocused before they fade away. I've actually had some dreams though where I remain conscious after the darkness and when I do it typically puts me back into the same dream I was just in, but usually it seems like its in a part of the dream that already occurred and I try again to do what I had originally intended, but then the darkness returns.

I've read that rubbing your hands together can help stabilize your dreams to keep you from losing them. I've actually had some success recently with a similar technique. I was in an RV and saw a tidal wave heading right for me. I quickly realized I was dreaming because tidal waves are a huge dream sign for me for some reason. I decided to get the hell out of there because dream or not being pummeled by a tidal wave sucks. I was then in a city somewhere in Mexico. I was walking and looking around and everything was getting fuzzy and starting to go out of focus. Then I noticed the street. I could feel its rough and rigid texture through my shoes. It felt so real that I began dragging my feet along the road and was astonished by the extent to which I could feel all these little bumps and ridges. When I looked back up the dream was one of the most vivid I've ever had, things looked very real. So stoked about my lucidity I began wandering the town. I entered a house and remembered that people some times practiced things in their dreams. I had a test coming up, so I decided I'd try and study. I began searching for a textbook for about 10 seconds and then thought to myself, wait, study in my dream, this is stupid lol. So then I left the house back to the streets, and this is where things get really weird. I decide I want to have sex because I can't think of anything better to do at the time and there's already plenty of women walking around so I wouldn't have to do much work. I approach one and tell her we're going to have sex and I start to think of where we're going to do this. I then see this chair that looks sort of like a chair at the dentist crossed with a massage table and I walk her backwards onto it. I climb on top of her chair and she turns into an open magazine with a picture of her in it. WTF?! I shout. I go get another girl and she turns into a magazine before we even get to the chair. Finally I find some woman who is going to perform oral sex for me, as we are walking she begins to rapidly age until she looks like some broken down old crack whore, and that's when I just give up and wake up shortly after.

It seems like my dreams are always out to sabotage my desires in them. I wonder if it's something in the back of my mind causing these things to happen or if this kind of stuff is just normal while you are trying to learn to control your dream. By the back of my mind, I mean, for example, if I were to say, "Don't think of an elephant" you can't help but immediately think of an elephant. I wonder if in my dreams my subconscious is playing that sort of game and I just don't realize it...

Any suggestions or techniques for dealing with problems like these? It seems like a lot of times it happens right when I'm about to get laid, so maybe it's a personal problem lol