Thread: No dream control?

It all comes down to expectations.
You've probably heard all sorts of hype and exaggeration regarding lucid dreaming.
One common misunderstanding is that lucid dreaming is the same as controlling your dreams. However, lucid dreaming and dream control are two separate skills.
Generally, dream control is a skill that you learn after you have developed the ability to become lucid in your dreams.
It's important to understand that you can have a lucid dream without exerting (or having) any control over your dream, equally, you can also have non-lucid dreams in which you use "superpowers" to control the dream (although in these you mistakenly believe that you're awake and have somehow developed some form of magic).
When you are lucid in a dream, this comes with the knowledge that everything you experience is "all a dream", or in other words, nothing is real and that it is all a projection of your mind.
This knowledge allows you, if you choose, to use dream control to change, manipulate, and exert your will over the dream.
Dream control is a skill you will develop alongside lucid dreaming, and will improve as you progress.

When I was little I used to imagine myself flying over the trees. It took a lot of practice. I do this with a lot of my dreaming control. Sometimes, I do have issues with flying. Once, I was flying around my sister's house. All of a sudden, I started doubting myself, and at that point, I was losing lucidity. Then it was like I was losing battery power.

A lot of it seems based on what you expect and believe will happen. Once you are convinced you are lucid than you can try jumping off something high, you know that you are in your mind and your body is in bed so you can't be hurt, see what happens. I found it is a great way to smash through mental blocks, though you have to be lucid about where you are, ie in a dream, and what that implies, otherwise it may just distort and reinforce a mental block.

Oh and another thing, JUST because lucid dreamers who are masters of dream control, it doesn't mean that they don't have issues with dream control, every now or then.