The unexpected

It is common knowledge that faith in dreams is the most powerful tool. If you believe, if you expect it... you can manipulate your dreams as easily as you can manipulate your thoughts.

Given this, I have always been curious as to all the evidence that seem to counter this "theory" in my own dreams.

In non-lucid dreams, I often behave in ways that are dictated by strong beliefs that I have in the dream. I'm talking about the narrative knowledge that comes from nowhere that allows you to know where you are, with who, and what your goal is in the dream. Now, I often get resistance from the dream characters which seem to see things differently, and I only ever realize once I woke up, that I was misinterpreting the dream, where we were, who we were and what we were meant to be doing. And it seems that if I had let go of my beliefs, the dream would have flowed much more easily and in a different direction.

In lucid dreams, when exerting control, I get effects, just not the expected effects.

So, from that, I sometimes feel like faith does not confer 100% control of the dream. And I wonder what else then. And I don't believe dreams come from outside the body. I just wonder what makes them inside. memory fragments and the connections between our different schema? Thought it makes sense to me that if I expect something, it will happen, maybe, the dream jumps to a next schema too rapidly?

I'm just curious what people think. Maybe I just haven't developed the proper level of expectation. But that's why I talked about my non-lucid dreams where I am 100% expecting x but y happens instead and sometimes y makes more sense then x, but I can only see that once awake. It's like my brain has an idea of the dream it's creating and I am completely oblivious to it.