Sometimes I can. But something called “Directed Dreaming” has worked for me. My mother was not a good mother. She was never physically abusive, but was often neglectful, verbally abusive, and I’m pretty sure she was bipolar. After she died, I had frequent dreams about her. Bad, bad dreams. In the dreams, she would come to me and criticize just about every aspect of my life.
Then I read about ‘directed dreaming’, in which you can tell the ‘subject’ of your dreams (in this case, my mother), ‘you’re only a dream, and you’re my dream, and I don’t have to allow you to be here if I don’t want to!’
The next time I had a dream about my mother, in my dream I talked to her. I said “Look, you’re a dream. I know it. I know you’re dead. You really must stay out of my dreams now; you are not allowed in”.
I haven’t had a dream about her since then.