I keep promising myself not to respond because I am so long-winded, but yet I can’t help myself. I want to thanks those that have responded. My original post was just to let people know that LD was often presented with only the “rosy” saleable image, while, like anything else…nothing is all good. I was, by no means, trying to claim that people shouldn’t try LD, but that it can become so common it is no longer fun.
On the power of lucid dreaming, I earlier listed some examples of some of my dreams. The fact that I didn’t use Godlike power wasn’t meant to show I don’t . It just that it is hard to remember all 25 years of my dreams, and the ones I do remember years later had some special meaning to me. As I gained more experience I have felt more relax and my dreams reflex that. My normal dreams now don’t involve trying to push “the envelop.” Like I said before, control has a trade-off, more control you have (or I, in this case), less you dream. In general I try now to go with the flow. In that sense I am lucky, that I have enough willpower that I don’t micromanage every detail. As the earlier writer mentioned about his late father, I don’t know if he meant that he directly put words into his father’s mouth or in the greater realm of dreaming, his mind …his words. If it were the former, I would consider that micromanaging. I generally chose to set the mood, environment, or overall feelings in a dream, but rarely go to the trouble to script the dialogue of the dream. In my earlier story about my girlfriend dream, I wanted some emotional element that I couldn’t get with a completely scripted dream. The frustrating part wasn’t what happened in the dream, but how easy it was to end it and start over. Outside of dreams like that, I generally ignore problems that come up in dreams, which in a way, is also control.
To stress the difference, here are two examples to help explain about control.
>Some years ago, a dream started with me in my house. While deciding what I wanted to do, I noticed that I didn’t like the view from my front window. I chose to have my house rotate 90 degrees to the right. But now I had a view of my neighbor’s shrubbery. I kept turning my house 90 degrees until I was back to the front. I then realized that I would much rather live in an apartment in metropolitan area. So I exited my house and walked across the street into my new skyscraper condo complex. Once I was in to lobby I found a staircase going down, but yet I had no desire to live below ground. So I changed the staircase to going up. Then I thought, “I want to live near the top and I am lazy, so I need an elevator instead.” Out goes the stairs and in comes an elevator. I enter the elevator and there are only 7 floors. Because I wanted to live on the 110th floor, I had to change that too. Having never since an elevator with 110 buttons, my elevator had floors 1 thru 7 plus a 110th floor button. I exited the elevator on the 110th floor to find a long hallway with one door. As I like neighbors I added 10 doors to each side of the hallways. As I entered my apartment I noticed it was just like the Odd Couples. For simplicity, I walked through the apartment and redesigned the furniture, the layout, and the view based on different television shows that I remembered. The point to this example is by the end of the dream I designed everything but had not interacted with even a single person, had any event take place, or even have time to do anything else.
.> I chose one night to show my military leadership ability by not only taking on Erwin Rommel, but also George Patton at the same time. I landed my African mercenary army in Marseille, France sometime in 1944. I split my army into two forces, one going toward Normandy-Belgium (Patton) and another going toward Frankfurt (Rommel). I didn’t plan any strategy just estimating that I would have more than a million men against each. I knew that I could easily empty Africa of all its’ people if I needed to. I did not worry about how many tanks, planes, or artillery I had…just pure numbers. Before my armies reached their objectives, I got a report that Rommel was attacking me from Northern Italy. I ignored it. As my armies progressed, so did Rommel. I could hear gunfire and artillery getting closer. By the time my armies reached their objectives, the German army was invading my port city Headquarter. Once I got word that my armies had taken their objectives, I exited my HQ into the middle of a combat ridden street(Germans everywhere) and announced to the world I had won. Combat stopped and shortly both Patton and Rommel arrived to sign their surrender.
*{before someone writes about my version of history…I was dreaming so I had no ability to check a history book for historical accuracy.}
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As you can see the second one was far more entertaining, and yet it took far less planning and control.
Wissdok 
). Then i just stand up, exclaim “wait a minute this is just a dream, you cant tell me what to do” and then drift through the wall. The wierd thing is, both the classroom interior and the outside of the school are almost photographicly correct with real life. Despite the fact i’ve never drifted through a wall at my old school, everything seems to be in the correct place. Most dreams i can walk out of my bedroom door and end up at the mall or something, they rarely “match up” with reality.