After your hard work with developing your dream recall and practicing reality testing, the biggest reward in lucid dreaming awaits you with dream control. The ability to control dreams is probably why you started to develop lucid dreaming skills, but regardless of the reason you’re here, get ready to start exerting control over your dreams with the following techniques.

Beginning Dream Control

As with most skills, you should start slowly – you shouldn’t attempt to change too much at once, or you may cause yourself to wake up from the excitement or excessive mental exertion. Start with closing your dream eyes and imagine that the brightness of the surrounding light has changed. Then open your dream eyes and see if your mental command was effective. Closing your eyes is a good beginning dream control technique because instant gratification in a dream can be very difficult to achieve, especially for beginning lucid dreamers.

Another popular basic technique to use is verbal commands. If you’re planning to change the weather, close your eyes and say it aloud. This is another way to reinforce the desire and make it more likely to happen.

Transportation and Movement in the Dream World

With an infinite number of dream scenarios for you to experience, navigation to your desired situation or location becomes a problem. One of the most common techniques lucid dreamers use is dream spinning. Close your eyes, and spin around while picturing yourself in your preferred dream. After opening your eyes, you’ll hopefully find yourself where you want to be, but it may take another try if necessary. Remember that if you find yourself awake in bed, it may be a false awakening, so remember to use reality tests.

Another good technique you can use to navigate your dream world is to use doors. If you happen to be in a room with a door, imagine your desired location on the other side of the door, and open it. In many dreams, I found myself entering through doors of my house and ending up in completely different locations. I’ve used this as a dream sign many times, and as a way to control my dreams.

Escaping the Dream World

Sometimes you’ll find that you want to get out of a dream – whether you’ve lost control, have a nightmare, or just simply want to wake up. So how do you wake yourself up? A good way to do this is to become excited – remember when over-excitement caused you to wake up from your first few lucid dreams? Use this to your advantage to get out of a dream!

You might find it hard to simply become excited, so another thing you can do is to do nothing. Close your eyes and shut out your senses. By cutting off the stimulation from the dream world, you’ll likely go back to the waking world. This is basically the opposite of grounding yourself to the dream world by interacting as much as you can with it. Once again, remember to perform a reality test after waking up to determine whether or not it was a false awakening.

Other Things to Keep in Mind for Dream Control

Many people expect to have Superman-abilities after having only a few lucid experiences, this will only lead to disappointment and frustration. Remember to start slowly and gradually improve your dream control skills. Practice and experience will ultimately make you the master controller of your dreams, so be positive and most importantly, have fun. Also remember that your experiences will be different from others, so don’t take these tips as absolute rules. As you develop better dream control, you’ll discover the best way to take command of your world. Dream control can be tough at first, but it’s definitely worth it. Some people may give up before reaping this reward, but you’ve already come this far, so don’t give it all up!