I've been working on controlling my HI for years, since I was a little kid but since I started frequenting this site I started really focusing on what I was doing and have had some really crazy results. Like for one I really think that HI is a phenomenologically different state that dreaming and there are many things that are really different between the two. Firstly I can make an HI body but its far harder to control than a lucid dream body, controlling your lucid dream body is natural but the HI body is like a puppet. Also in HI visions states you don't own the scene at all, the scene comes and then gets super vivid based on some arbitrary factors of the subconscious and more often than not in my experience when you come to something interesting it will be in 'tour' mode where you fly from one scene to the next. I've learned to fight off that impulse and have actually managed to follow some HI people, and it was wild, there is nothing really similar to dreaming in an HI vision. I think the main difference is that in HI at the highest levels that i've experienced I don't feel like i'm in my brain, I feel like i'm somewhere else and desperately trying to hang on to what i'm seeing but with constant awareness that i'm just seeing this and it isn't real, but in a dream that awareness isn't there, even in a LD (now correct me if I'm wrong) there is still some aspects of the mind that don't realize that you're dreaming, that's why people have limited powers or if they want to go somewhere they have to travel there or whatever; in HI preparatory I have full power, I mean the full realization that everything that I am seeing is from me and I can manipulate it at will. This is a blessing and a curse realize because it means that very little is ever surprising. But It also means that in latter HI states I can immediately realize that this isn't me, and if I tried any special powers, (besides walking, and maybe going incorporeal if anything attacks me, or flying if i'm in a zero gravity situation) I'd kill the scene, I'd be kicked out. Maybe when I get better I can do more.
But anyway, I used the technique to go lucid yesterday, it was the first time I got it to work but when I woke up I easily realized that I was dreaming, actually I kept trying to wake up and had maybe 6 false awakes; then I ate a eggplant that looked like a banana; it wasn't very interesting but I new I was dreaming.