There are two simple principles that guide and determine every single aspect of dreaming. Understanding these principles will greatly increase your ability to control your dreams once lucid.

1. Everything in your dreams requires your attention to exist.
2. The more you focus on one element, the more detail around that element, your mind creates.

Your first reaction might be that this is oversimplifying things, but the effects of these 2 principles when combined with the vast resource of knowledge and experiences contained within your mind are infinitely complex. Just think about it for a moment; every single dream you have ever had, has been created by the interaction of just these 2 principles.

1. Everything in your dreams requires your attention to exist.

This might seem an obvious point to make, but it is probably the most fundamental principle of dreaming. The only things that exist in a dream are things that you are aware of, and that also means as soon as you stop paying attention to something and forget about it, it literally ceases to exist. If you dream you are in an empty room with no windows and just a single door then at that moment nothing exists except that room, there is no outside! Open the door and it could lead anywhere, into your local shop, into the middle of a desert or into outer space. Where it does lead can either be guided by your conscious mind or your subconscious will pick for you.

A key use of this principle is that simply by focusing your attention you can bring something into existence. If you’re back in the room described above and you focus your attention on the idea that when you turn around a grand piano will be there behind you, when you actually turn around it will be!

This is also very useful if you find yourself in a frightening situation, people often report that they are being chased or attacked in a dream. Well remember as a child when your parents used to say “If you ignore them, they will just go away”, that’s quite literally true in a dream environment!

2. The more you focus on one element, the more detail around that element, your mind creates.

If you consider that the first principle of dream control determines the content of your dreams, the second determines the extent to which that content features in your dreams.

The detail that arises from your increased attention or focus is formed by the natural associations of your mind that link to the element you are focusing on. These mental associations can take many forms, sometimes direct and sometimes abstract.

For example imagine you see a small toy car in front of you. Depending on whether your focus is directed towards what it is, what it’s used for, what its made out of, on how old it is, on who owns it, very different natural associations will come forward in your mind, but all are examples of more detail being added to that object. It is important to remember that the associations of your mind aren’t just literal and visual, the toy car might have an associative link to a memory of playing with a similar car when you were a child, and the emotion you were feeling at the time could resurface.

Of course in lucid dreams, and as with the first principle, the detail created and the flow of the dream can either be directed consciously or will arise spontaneously from your subconscious.

The key to using these rules to your advantage is in finding balance. Focusing too much attention can pull you in like a black hole, creating more and more detail which in turn pulls your attention in further, the distracting and captivating effect of this cycle is often to lose lucidity. The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t enough attention to a particular element, it will become unstable and start to fade out of existence.

Think of guiding your dreams as being like teaching a child, you don’t want to try and constantly control every little detail the entire time, but rather just give them a little nudge in the right direction every so often to take the dream in the direction you want it to go.

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About the Author:
I run the website www.InfiniteMinds.info providing information, skills and techniques on a range of personal development and self growth topics. Our current projects are; Consciousness Engineering, Lucid Dreaming, Brainwave Entrainment and Advanced Learning.
You can find out mroe about lucid dreaming here: http://www.infiniteminds.info/Lucid_Dreaming.html
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