i agree very much and think it's an astute observation. To extend it that observation about the hands into a post I wrote in on the dream control forum, I think that the reason why focusing on our hands stabilizes our dreams is because the amount of detail we have to cope with drops dramatically. eg the process goes something like -> 'I am already very familiar with my hands, they are the easiest part of my body to focus on and my brain is intimately aware of what they look like, therefore if I concentrate on them I can ignore what's happening around me and allow the dream to stabilize'.

I find the time that we start losing control is when there is too much information for our brain comfortably process. To make a comparison, look at simple old fashioned cartoons like for instance the animated "Alice in Wonderland" (to pick an apt example) and a more modern animated film "Final Fantasy: Spirits within". A very important element of fantasy films like this is 'suspension of disbelief', ignoring for the moment that something is impossible and believing it could happen.

It has been very noticable in recent times as animated films became more complex that they have become harder to believe, ie. suspension of disbelief is harder. If you look at FF:SW this was an incredibly well animated, beautiful film. However it irritated a lot of people because it tried to make characters that looked as realistic as possible, while putting them in fantastic and impossible situations (apparently the skin for the characters in FF was mind blowingly complex, having many different layers to create the final effect).

However as said people didn't like the film because they found the realism implausible. One of the easiest places to pick it up was in characters eyes. This - deadeye - is common with computer generated imagery. There is just something extremely subtle about it that we recognise as not being real. Humans are extremely eye-centric, we make eye contact all day, every day. It's very important.

On the otherhand, an old fashioned film like Alice has characters with simple eyes that are if you think about it extremely simple representations of the shape of an eye. A football like squashed circle with a black cornea and iris. Our brain is very good at making the jump and interpreting that shape to be an eye. As our brain accepts this animation with much less information to challenge it films done in this style are easier to believe.

I guess the point I am making in a rambling way is that our brain processes data and is good at it, and at seeing problems with what it is processing. When we sleep a part of our brain that deals with events and how believable they are is turned off. This same part of the brain is the part that is supressed when people take halucinogenic drugs or are schitzophrenic.

I've found that the more data I have to deal with in a dream the harder it is to stay asleep. If I focus on just my hands, the easiest part of my 'self' to see, I can stabalize my dream because the amount of data I have to interpret (or my brain rather has to interpret) has gone down dramatically.

Sorry if this post is very fragmented I started writing it, stopped half way and went off to talk to my housemate before coming back to finish.