In the past few days I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of people not being able to turn on lights for one reason or another, e.g “your brain can’t change the light levels in a dream, because there is no actual light coming into your eyes” and none of it made much sense, so I put it as my goal to finally get the damn lights to work.
In the past I could never turn the light on; when I flipped a switch either nothing happened or it was really dim, like 15-20% power.
I also tried the technique of willing the light to happen, and it had same weak effect but also required constant focus on the light source. After years of ld-ing I tried it again 2 nights ago, and still nothing worked. I was standing there in a room, fully lucid, and wondering why the hell it is so hard to turn on the lights despite my focus and concluding that I’ll probably never be able to do it because that’s just how my brain is wired. Then last night as I went to brush my teeth before sleeping at 1AM, after playing a dreamy videogame(s&s EP) I was in a great drowsy dreamy state and as I turned on the bathroom light, it kind of affected me for some reason, like “wow the light is on” and it put a smile on my face.
Then surely enough, last night I encoutered 2 light switches in a LD and both worked 100%, I was like “Wow! Is the light really on? And it’s so bright like in real life! Thanks brain!” Then I turned it off and on again and it worked effortlessly, as if my subconcious finally made some connection that flipping switches should light up the room. So, my advice is to get in a sleepy relaxed state and marvel at the functionality of light switches IRL, about how easy it is to light up a room.
Well, some time ago I opened the topic about RC’s and how/why they work or don’t work. I’ve also thought about it a lot and only logical conclusion was that RC’s work only because you made them to work.
For example every guide will say that your hands looks odd in a dream and when you look at them they do look odd but who says that they can not look normal inside the dream? They can because I made them look normal as you did make the light switch to work.
We enter the dream with information such as: light switches don’t work in a dream and when you are in a dream and when you are doing RC you think: if it’s a dream it won’t work and if it’s the dream it doesn’t work because you made it not working with your thinking that it doesn’t work but if you would find yourself in a waking life the light switch would of course work if it’s functional and not broken since we don’t have that power to “override” them as we can in a dream.
The same is with everything and every other aspect of the dreams, RC’s and well EVERYTHING! Only difference is if we are able to control it to that extend, if we are able to dismiss what we heard and make our own rules as we can in a dream…
I agree with the post above. What is possible and what is not in dreams seems to be largely governed by expectations. The reason it is helpful for people to make prescriptions to us in their guides such as “your hand will look odd in a dream”, is that if we take them at their word our mindset will make it so, and we will have gained a useful way to check reality. It’s a kind of white lie, or rather a self-fulfilling prophecy which can only come true if you believe it. That is why, when we do the classic “breathe in with nose and mouth blocked” check in waking life, it is of paramount importance that we vividly imagine the air rushing in, and expect it so strongly that we are in fact surprised when it does not. That expectation is why it works in dreams: there are no universally applicable laws of dream physics which we cannot change through belief.
One of the most difficult things in learning dream control, and the most rewarding, is the discarding of unhelpful expectations. Expectations such as “dreams are not coherent”, “dream characters talk gobbledegook”, “lucid dreams are short and unstable”, “lucid dreams are hard to get”, “I’m about to wake up!”. There is nothing to limit us to these stifling and artificial sentiments. Nothing physical at all. These can all be got rid of, and then we really start to soar. But how can we get over things that can be so ingrained? In a medium where our results are completely based on expectations, how can we give the dreams the chance to surprise us and overturn them? It is hard, but with determination, practice, and an open mind, I think it can be done, as Gaze, on a small scale, has found (congratulations!) and we can have dreams as long, as coherent, as filled with light as we please! As for waking life, with these new energy saving bulbs we have to use, well, that’s a different story…turn them on now and they’ll be ready for Christmas.