I got to thinking about why light switches don’t work in dreams. I think it’s becuase the two objects(switch and light) seem disconnected and like two entirely different entities. I mean, to your brain it probaly looks like the equivilent of steping on the sidewalk, and the garage door opening. So I thought if a electrician who has seen the wiring of a light switch to a light bulb has a dream, wouldn’t his brain know why the Switch controls light becuase he’s seen the wiring and worked with it? I mean, most of us haven’t installed out own electric wiring on lights, so how would I brain really tell the difference?
Well, if you believe the lightswitch will turn on the light, I guess it will turn on the light… why don’t you concentrate on it like really concentrate hard and imagine it before you do it… it might happen
technical knowledge… doesn’t help… for me
i am studying in a technical school, got to do with electronics all the time
and guess:
Light swiches work! sometimes… jeah, the really do random in my dreams, but i usually don’t use them… in most of my dreams it is bright enough… and i have no reason to darken it…
light switches work fine for me. Just like real life.
I tested this as an experiment once… They do indeed work.
The problem is that most people have read that it does not work, which then creates a mind blockage and make this true! As with everything else in dreams… It depends on what you expect to happen.
Light switches do work in my dreams, lucid or not. Just a matter of expectation I guess but… how many people really expect spontaneously that light-switches don’t work 
It seems this RC, which has also been used in the movie Waking Life, is really not trustworthy 
In a LD I tried to switch on a lamp, and it didn’t work, thought I didn’t think about switches and RC at the moment and did expect it to light. But, probably, that’s because this lamp often doesn’t work in real life either… hrug: But when I began to switch everything after that, already expecting it would not work, nothing worked… It is natural, I think.
computers work for me in dreams…
entering into comp games is fun, squeesing thoguh the moniter into CS or COD
you must have a death count of like millions
does it hurt?
i rememeber being shot in my dreams… its stings like crap… but that wasnt lucid
When I’m scared in dreams lights never seem to work. But in my last LD every light worked, but instead of a specific light turning on the general lighting level increased a bit. I kept increasing with each light I turned on. But in general lights and electrical stuff works for me. I tried surfing once, I could write the adress with the keyboard. But when I pressed enter nothing happened 
For some people, this may be influenced by reading that lightswitches don’t work. For me personally, I noticed they don’t work even before I read about it. So there must be some reason why it’s different than in real life, while other mechanical objects seem to work fine (e.g. TV, computer, automobile).
About the knowledge of wiring influencing the dreams… I think the connection between turning the switch and lighting the bulb can be even stronger in the brain of a non-electrician. Electricians more often deal with switches, which don’t work, and wires, which are not connected. Their mind can be more inventive in thinking out different plausible reasons why the switch doesn’t work.
I don’t find myself in houses very much in dreams, but I did try out light switches once, here how it worked:
The light switch worked fine.
But I could also turn the light on or off by just concentrating 
technically, if this theory is taken into account, I wouldnt be able to drive cars in my dreams because a) Im not a nechanic and b) I still cant drive nor have ever driven… yet in many NDs I have…
I think that the functioning of dream switches has nothing to do with your knowledge of dream wiring. You can fall in a dream, even if you don’t know much about the nature of gravitation, and the opposite, even physicists can fly in their dream, in spite of everything they know about the real world. During our life, we switch on the light many thousands times, it is more than enough to create an association between pushing a button and lighting the room. It’s more interesting, why they don’t work so often, that it can even be a dream sign.
First of all, besides all those thousands of working switches, everyone has seen at leas one switch that didn’t work, IRL, nothing is perfect or eternal in this world. So, a malfunctioning switch, or watch, or any other device is quite natural, at least, it is unnatural not in the sense of being able to levitate or having seven fingers. Then, a switch will work, if it has to work according to the story-line of the dream (and will fail, if the story-line includes a not-working switches, nothing special about it). But if it is only your will, if you decide to switch on the light, using that small part of conscious that is active at the moment, the switch will very likely fail. Not because you are not sure if it should work, but because you subconscious is too lazy to re-render the whole room with colors, shadows and small details… Or too stubborn to let you do what you want, when it wants to show you a dark room. The same thing with watches: they don’t work not because it’s difficult to imagine a realistic watch, but because it’s difficult to guess what time it could be.
They generally work ok for me.
LaBerge noticed this phenomeom in his early research, and decided that this reflected a general difficulty in raising the “light level” in a dream. He hypothesised that this reflected a physiological constraint, which in turn reflected the degree of activation in certain neurological structures in the brain.
I suspect that half the attractiveness of this hypothesis was that it was something that could actually be measured in a (lucid dreaming) sleep lab, and whether it turned out to be correct, it would allow him to re-inforce (a politically neccesity) the impression that he was doing “real”, (ie. “scientifically grounded”) research.
But perhaps I’m being more cynical than strictly neccesary.