If you already know how to lucid dream, or if you’ve been following our Roadmap to Lucid Dreaming, there is still one step to overcome before you can say you’ve truly mastered the skill: dream control. There is still plenty to explore and do in lucid dreams without it, but if you master dream control you can do literally anything that you can conceive of, in your dreams.

What is Dream Control?

Lucid dreaming and dream control are often confused for one another, and with good reason. They are essentially the two halves of the same skill. Lucid dreaming is the act of dreaming while aware that you are dreaming, but dream control goes a step beyond lucidity, allowing you to take that lucid dream and actively shape your experience in it. Flying, using superpowers and changing the scenery are just some of the things that fall under the category of dream control.

What Can You Do with Dream Control?

It’s easy to think of dream control as a singular skill that you can master, giving you the ability to rule over your dream content, but the truth is that it’s more of a scale. For instance, flying is often easier to do in dreams than changing the landscape because it’s easy for us to conceptualize what flying might be like. We’ve all jumped into a pool before or played on a swing enough to know what the basic elements of flying feel like, but few of us have had practice inventing landscapes in our daily lives.

Overall, you really can do anything in your dreams if you master dream control completely, but it isn’t always an easy task. For the sake of making this skill as easy to master as possible, we’ll divide dream control into stages and list them from easiest to learn to the most difficult.

Stages of Dream Control

We’ve broken dream control into 4 stages to illustrate that some aspects of dreams will be easier to control than others. This does not mean that you necessarily have to learn in this order, but it will be helpful to understand each stage before attempting them.

Stage 1: Controlling Yourself

Stage one of dream control deals with how you control yourself in dreams. After attaining lucidity, you should be able to consciously control your actions right off the bat. This means that you can do simple things like choose which direction to walk or throw a punch. Since this is inherent in lucid dreaming, it’s essentially stage zero.

Stage one begins as you shift from doing things that you can do in waking life (kicking, jumping, swimming, etc) and towards things that you can do in dreams without changing anything except your actions. This involves things like flying and jumping off high up places, since they are things that you can’t/shouldn’t do in waking life but don’t require you to really create or change anything within the dream.

At this stage, all you really need to do is practice lucid dreaming and let it set in that the rules that constrain you in daily life no longer apply while in-dream. Taking flying as an example; you begin by jumping – which is something you should be capable of easily in dreams if you are capable of it in real life. Then, you try to extend the jump. Aim for jumping higher each time or staying in the air longer, and in no time you should be flying around. You can also try to force it by jumping off of something with the intent to fly, given that you first ensure that you’re dreaming.

Stage 2: Controlling Dream Elements

The next stage past controlling yourself is altering things that are already around you. For instance, if you are being chased by something, you can order it to stop chasing you. You may even turn a monster attacking you into an ally or ride it around. Likewise, you might take something inanimate, like a tree, and have it move out of your way or bend down to pick you up.

What separates stage 2 from stage 1 is that it involves a higher degree of difficulty than controlling yourself because you are already used to controlling yourself. Your ability to use stage 2 dream control will vary a lot from person to person. Some may get it right off the bat, while others will need time to get used to the idea that they are the master of their own reality.

Currently we have no techniques specifically helpful in learning this stage, but we do have some general advice: work first with characters that you find comforting, stay calm and keep at it if you aren’t successful right away. If you have techniques that helped you learn 2nd stage dream control, please leave them in the comments.

Stage 3: Summoning 

Stage 3 is where things get tricky, but the payoff is extraordinary. This stage involves summoning things into the dream that weren’t there to begin with. For instance, you might summon a sword to fight off a monster, or conjure up a fireball instead. You may request the presence of the deceased, or even dream up a movie star to have sex with. Nearly anything becomes possible at this stage. 

Because stage 3 of dream control involves creating people and objects out of thin air, this one will take some practice. It often helps to start with something familiar to you, something that you can visualize exceptionally well. If you try to summon a tank, but don’t have a great idea of what that should look like, it will be harder than summoning a simpler object that you’re familiar with. Although that isn’t to say that it’s impossible to summon complex items, just that when learning you should focus on simpler ones.

Stage 3 involves a high degree of visualization, so anything that will help you increase that skill in daily life should also transfer to your dreams. Learning to sculpt, sketch or draw, for example, will stimulate the parts of your brain involved with visualization, and should in turn make summoning objects in dreams easier. 

Beyond visualization of what you wish to summon, there is one more major hurdle. As our childhood brains developed, they had to develop what is known as object permanence. This is essentially the realization that things don’t disappear just because they leave your line of sight – and conversely that they don’t just appear from nowhere. To get to stage 3 of dream control, you will need your sleeping mind to overcome this constraint of daily life, as it does not apply to your dream world.

With circumventing our brain’s natural idea of object permanence in mind, there are a few techniques we can use to overcome this more easily:

• Spin around a few times while thinking about what you’d like to appear. Because the dream will have to readjust after being blurred by the spinning, this should make it easier for new objects to appear in the dream. Spinning is already used as a dream stabilization technique but it doubles as a method for summoning things as well.
• Look for what you want to appear either behind a door, in a box, or in another place where it is hidden. This works by circumventing the issue of believing that things don’t just magically appear, as your brain instead focuses on finding them and assumes that they were there behind the door all along.

Stage 4: Changing Dreams

We define stage 4 dream control as the ability to change your dreamscape entirely. This means becoming lucid in a dream and consciously moving to an entirely different dream of your choosing. In a way, it is an extension of stage 3 where you are summoning an entirely new dream – and all of the elements in it – all at once. 

It can be extremely challenging to do this, but there are techniques that can make it easier, especially if you have already mastered up to stage 3. These techniques involve a similar method to the ones discussed in step 3, particularly leveraging the idea that the dream you wish to move to was there all along. You can do this by ‘going to’ the dream instead of trying to change your surroundings directly.

If you want to enter a new dream setting, try imagining it behind a door and then going through that door. Often you will find that you’ve entered into a different dream, and with practice you increase the likelihood that it will be the precise dream you hope for. Alternatives include anything that would act as a gateway to the new dream, such as jumping into a puddle or walking through a mirror or portal. Likewise, the spinning method mentioned in stage 3 will also make it possible to change the entire dreamscape instead of summoning objects, if you so choose. 

Dream Control and Beyond

Now you know what dream control is and how to learn it, it’s time to get out there and start practicing. Once you nail these techniques down, you essentially have free reign in a universe that belongs entirely to you. There are a few methods that might be considered beyond even stage 4 dream control, but the tools to learning them are already available to you through the same methods that helped you learn lucid dreaming. 

While this concludes our Roadmap to Lucid Dreaming Series, remember that there is no end to the discoveries and techniques related to dreaming. Make sure to stay up to date with us so you don’t miss any articles about new methods, discoveries, and emerging technologies related to dreaming.