Troubles controlling dreams

I recently decided to get into lucid dreaming again, but it only took one dream for me to remember why I stopped doing it last time.

My lucid dreams suck.

I've been lucid dreaming for a long time now, but not consistently. There have been multiple times that I tried to take a more disciplined approach to lucid dreaming, but I usually ended up stopping because of how bad my dreams were. Anytime I try to lucid dream, I usually end up someplace mundane and I have very little control. Often times, I'll be in a fantastical environment only for it to morph into someplace I go frequently in real life, usually my house. I once had a lucid dream where I was in a massive palace, and then it turned into my house. I had a different lucid dream where I was on a beach, and then it turned into my house. Last night I spent an entire lucid dream intentionally fading the dream away and then trying to recreate it again because the futuristic spaceship I was in kept turning into an ordinary building. At one point, it even turned into my house.

Now I can understand why it would be more common to experience dreams about things from everyday life then more novel experiences. What's particularly interesting though is that I can dream of very novel things when I'm not lucid. I think that being lucid has a direct effect of causing me to dream of something more mundane, usually my house.

This isn't to say that I haven't had any really vivid lucid dreams, I have. Probably one of my best lucid dreams was one that I indued using a variant of WILD based entirely on visualization. I just visualized an entire scenario and it slowly became more vivid. At first, it wasn't as vivid as actual dream, but it was far more enjoyable because I was in control. Though I'm pretty sure that it eventually became a full dream, I think that by that point I was only vaguely aware that I was dreaming. I want try this method again, but it seems quite hard.

I think it’s quite common to dream about your house and mundane places, at least it is for me. It could be due to the fact that we’re aware when lucid that we’re asleep in our bed, creating an expectation to find ourselves in our house. This is the case with false awakenings. That said, it does sound like you may have developed a negative expectation about it. These sort of expectations are given power by how frustrated we get with them. It’s a common struggle when it comes to dream control.

I would suggest the best way to beat this would be to accept for now you may end up in mundane settings but embrace it, be happy you’re somewhere mundane and pre-plan a bunch of fun dream goals you can do in such locations. I’ve always found you’re never too far away from something interesting, you just have to explore a bit and look for something that takes your interest. For example, look through your bedroom draws or wardrobe, you never know what you might find. Another thing you could do is create a portal within your house. This could be a mirror, your TV or try manifest some kind of teleportation device so if you regularly find yourself in your house you know there’s an option to escape somewhere more interesting. When you get to a point where you’re no longer worried about it the issue may simply dissolve.