Declaring War on "Expectation"

One of the most common bits of advice about dream control you will see floating around the cybersphere here is to manage your expectations and the dream will fall into line. If anything isn't working just believe it more and it suddenly will.

Now, to a degree this is undeniably true. We experience the world in a certain way and our dreams reflect that. They tend to contain gravity, light, sounds, recognizable events, characters that respond in a measurably understandable way, and so forth. But it is also undeniable that dreams defy expectations. This is a simple fact, if you have ever felt surprised in a dream then you should agree with me (...right?) sometimes gravity fails for no "reason", DC's of people you know can act in utterly bizarre and unfathomable ways. Even the dreamer him/herself has the potential to act in utterly uncharacteristic way.

There is also untold examples of a dreamer HAVING the expectation of something happening, and it fails or falls short. When this crops up in the forum it's often met with doubt that the dreamer truly expected their control to work. So lets take an example that the average dreamer has experienced themselves. Have you ever succeeded, dream after dream in a skill, lets say flying, only to have it suddenly fail in an otherwise normal situation? You know what it feels like, how to do it, what affect it will have on the environment, but still you claw at the air uselessly? No amount of "expectation" let you achieve your goal, or let overcome the flaw.

Yet another example of the flaws of expectation is when you expect something NOT to work, and yet, it does. For example, I've had dreams where I'm being attacked by someone with a sword, I reach behind my back reaching for the sword that I had hanging there, and it was gone! As the attacker drew in to kill me I pretended to have a sword and swung it up to block him, knowing full well that I had nothing in my hand, yet there was a clash of metal, a spark, and his sword was stopped by my pretend one. (I've even pointed intangible guns and made a shooting noise to fatally wound DC's before) It might be argued that by pretending I was creating expectation, but I don't believe this to be true.

Even if I am completely wrong in my suspicions with expectations, and they are the true path to total dream control, how could anyone possibly purposely change their actual expectations? Isn't trying to change your expectation to something else proof that you do not expect your desired outcome, and any attempt to CHANGE it only further cements it as your real expectation? If these things are true isn't it not only useless but harmful to use it as advice to others seeking dream control?

Now, the nature of dreams themselves is that they are unproveable and unknowable to another, maybe I am just an odd dreamer (I don't think so, but I can't know for sure) is there anyone else who has these experiences with expectations like I have? Does anyone care to postulate what the real role expectation has in dream control assuming it is not the single infallible holy grail?

Thanks for reading

I think the "expectation" (haha) that there is such a thing as "complete and total dream control" is a false premise to start with.

Indeed, the time that summons have failed I felt it was much more of a "wish" and "hope" than confident belief/expectation. In cases where I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that an item would appear or a DC would act in a certain way, it always works.

How to explicitly manipulate expectations? One powerful way is on-purpose pretend memories. "Oh, yeah, I left my lightsaber hanging on my utility belt here". That has a very very high rate of success for me and others.

All one can do is honestly self-evaluate your true level of belief. And, sometimes, things don't work per plan. Per Robert Waggoner, lucid dreamers are just sailors on the sea of dream. We can turn the ship, but we don't control the tides. Mostly :).

I hear your point that the word "expectation" has been used carelessly. What we are really looking for are ways for the conscious mind to influence the unconscious mind because, it is theorized, dream content is created by the unconscious mind. If there is a "holy grail," it would be direct and complete control over that part of the mind, and thus control over dream content. But we know it doesn't work that way, or else it wouldn't be unconscious. The best we can do are indirect methods.

With that in mind, "creating an expectation" is a process that involves both the conscious and unconscious. It starts with a conscious thought that something may be true. That thought is not a belief. It is a proposition to a belief. The unconscious mind has the final say on your beliefs. Posing a proposition is an indirect way of triggering the unconscious to make a judgement, but it does not influence the outcome. If the unconscious confirms the proposition, then, and only then, does it becomes an "expectation." If not, it's just another rejected idea. And even if you succeed in creating the expectation, that doesn't guarantee it will influence the dream content in the intended way.

As an aside, desire and willpower are also in the realm of the unconscious and are another routes to try to get the unconscious to act. Combining expectation with desire or will might improve your chances, but it's still not a guarantee of success.

So, I think there really is something to expectations but we need to be very precise in how we describe and use them. One cannot create beliefs or expectations with conscious effort alone. They only come from the unconscious. It is imprecise to say: "You really need to believe/expect that X will happen." I'd suggest a better summary is: "You need to craft a plausible way to propose that X will happen, with due consideration for your actual beliefs about X, in such a way that X becomes realized in the dream." And, it helps if you acquire new beliefs or shift existing ones so that they support your effort. Of course, that takes time and care.