First Principle - Expectation is Key
Intention, desire and sheer force of willpower all have their part to play in shaping the level of control you experience within any given dream, but one psychological property has a greater effect than all these combined; expectation.
More often than not, the things we expect to happen in a lucid dream, do happen. There is a good reason for this; our expectations are our rules for how the world works. Rules we have distilled from our experiences and stored in our subconscious minds to help us plan for and make better decisions in the future. These will be everything from simple causal relationships like ‘if you touch a flame it makes your hand hurt’, which you probably learnt to expect very young, through to much more complicated expectations about how people behave in certain circumstances.
The important point here is that you don’t carry around all your expectations in your conscious mind, think what a huge burden this would be, instead they arise naturally from your subconscious and so are naturally woven into your dreams as they are formed. By learning how to direct your mind to have a different set of expectations within the dreamworld, or better still, to get rid of as many expectations as possible you are building yourself a new set of rules that will allow you to have a greater control over your dreams.
Second Principle - Understand the Concept
It’s all very well to say ‘have a different set of expectations’, but how do you go about doing this in practice. Cause and effect is one of the most fundamental concepts your mind understands, it underlies everything you have experienced day to day for your entire life. By having an understanding of how a particular concept or process is supposed to work i.e. what cause creates a particular effect, you can get your subconscious mind to accept the new idea and build it into your set of expectations about the dreamworld.
Let’s take flying as an example, something almost everyone wants to do in a lucid dream at one time or another. Your mind already has a rule built in from years of experience that says ‘People can’t fly’, this concept is tied together with hundreds of others like; how gravity works, what wings are for, and so on.
To override the idea that people can’t fly, you need to give your mind a new rule which it can use without having to re-write all those other associated rules. So I might choose a rule ‘I can fly because I’m wearing these boots that have tiny powerful rockets’. Your mind can now add this rule in, without having to throw lots of others out, you will then find it much easier to have the expectation that you can fly and as a result it will be much easier to do.
It doesn’t matter what explanation you use, what new rule you choose; ‘a wizard gave me magical powers’, or ‘I’m on a different planet with much less gravity’ are just as good as ‘I’m wearing rocket boots’ for making your mind accept that you can fly. The important thing is that you understand why whatever it is you want to do should work. Also the less rules you have to add or change the easier it will be for you. This is the main reason why using ‘magic’ or ‘advanced technology’ are two of the easiest tricks for effective dream control.
Third Principle - Recognise the Context
The bigger the change you introduce into your dreamworld in one go, the more instability you create. Even though dreams can seem very random with unrelated ideas, themes, characters and scenes combined together, they still have a sense of flow to them. One thing leads to another which leads to another and so on. A psychological framework that connect lots of ideas, associations and expectations like this to create a coherent experience of a certain situation is called a ‘Schema’. Every dream has a certain schema just as different situations in every day waking life do.
If you are walking around on a spaceship for example, it would be part of your dreams schema to expect to see space out of a window, or to have an alien chase you down a corridor. Neither of things would be part of the schema if you were walking around your own house. It doesn’t mean either of these two things have to happen whenever you find yourself on a spaceship, just that they could and the ideas would naturally fit together.
When you try to do something outside of your schema in a lucid dream it forces your mind to try distort it so it encompasses the new idea. If it’s a little change this is easy, but the bigger the change is the more trouble your mind has doing this quickly and so the dream loses stability. In practice too much instability means one of two things; either the dreamworld resets and you most likely lose lucidity or else it disintegrates and you wake up.
By recognising the context of a particular dream you can more easily choose the right concepts and expectations to play with without breaking apart the foundations of the dream. For example, if you become lucid and find yourself on an alien spaceship but would rather be back on earth, expecting to find a teleporting machine which can beam you back down is a much more consistent method of dream control than expecting you can use a magic spell to disappear and reappear somewhere else.