Thread: 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.