My mind is toying with me!

Over the last coulple of weeks I've had a couple of dreams where I realise I can control the dream by believing something will happen. For example in the first dream I was running away from 'bad guys' chashing me, then somehow I realised that if I believe they will trip over, they did. I kept on doing it for fun for the rest of the dream.

In another dream, I was observing some people in a room, I was behind some sort of wall. Every time I went behind the wall and thought of something or predicted what those people were doing, they would do the very same thing when I looked back over the wall.

I did this without question, it's as if my dream self thought 'cool' and carried on the with the dream :( Is there any way I could use these past dreams to increase my chances of an LD? I've thought of using the mantra "I will do a reality check when I can control my dream", but that seems a little long winded and ambiguous...

This happens to me sometimes, once I avoided a monster by flying above it so it couldn't reach me and didn't question it at all.

Maybe you can try visualizing those situations again but this time imagine becoming lucid from it by questioning why you're doing that and follow it with RCing, and then you can just imagine doing whatever you would want to do after that. Really try to picture it as vividly as possible, and maybe do that multiple times a day and before going to sleep. This may even work with regular bizarre dreams where you're not really doing any control but just something odd is happening. You would probably want to keep changing the dreams you visualize from day to day just to keep it fresh.

I do this occasionally if I have a bizarre dream, but I'm still pretty new so I don't know how effective it is.

You may want to make sure you are doing the right RCs. I suggest every one should have a physical and a mental RC. The mental RC is basically something like everytime anything happens in your day, focusing and asking yourself "how do I know this is not a dream?"
Someone gets up to talk in front of your class, you think "is this a dream?", Then focus on how you can tell it is real. Soon, when odd things happen you will go "how do I know I am not dreaming? Oh! Wait, a dragon with pigeon wings? Oh, I am dreaming!"
OOne of my basic mental RCs is really looking at signs and asking that question. Signs are all weird in dreams. I look at the stop sign and think "do the letters move, or look backward?" Every once in a while they are, and I become lucid. Create your own versions, but definately add amental RC.