Some people believe that if you respect the messages in your dreams, you should never try to lucid dream or control aspects of the dream in any way. I don’t agree. It’s in the act of trying to control, that we realise what our true obstacles are.
I’m using the word “control” in the positive sense here, meaning that you have an intention to accomplish something and you are directing focus towards that goal.
Most lucid dreamers understand that not all goals are easily attained in dreams. We might be able to accomplish our mission of, say, flying to Jupiter, but more often than not, we will face obstacles if we have a lofty goal like that. The obstacles that we come across give us valuable insight that we can apply to our waking life. The obstacles in lucid dreams are the dream messages.
Let’s take a common lucid dream activity: flying.
Flying Dreams
Let’s say you want to fly in a dream. You become lucid, remember your goal, and start to fly. Initially you rise. As you rise, you bump against the ceiling. Try as you might, you cannot get through the roof. You might even remind yourself that the roof is only a dream construction. This realisation might help somewhat, but as you move through the seemingly solid object, you start to doubt yourself. Everything goes dark and you panic. The panic knocks you out of the dream.
This scenario isn’t based on a real dream, but has elements that I’ve encountered before. The fact that you cannot move beyond the ceiling might point to different things, depending on your personal circumstances, beliefs, and challenges.
It might point to fears and limitations about your career or life journey. Alternatively, it might be that the dream is urging you to cultivate more presence before reaching higher. Or there might be another interpretation entirely. Dream interpretation is highly personal. Dreams should be analysed first by asking, What does this mean to me? When it comes to specific meanings of things, books and online sources should only be consulted as a supplement or a last resort.
The point is this: The obstacles we face in lucid dreams mirror our waking reality. Our internal beliefs and attitudes inform our dreams. Our waking challenges are, not only mirrored, but sometimes amplified in lucid dreams. This is a key thing to understand because we might be able to move through difficulties more quickly if we approached the problem from the dream side than if we did from a purely physical plane. This is not true for all things but certainly for some.
If we approach a lucid dream with intention and awareness, we might come to creative solutions that elude us not only in our waking state but also in our regular dream state. We don’t have to view lucid dreaming as something that circumvents dream interpretation; we can use lucid dreaming as a way to interpret our dreams in a deeper way.