"Expectations are very powerful in dreams, and I suspect they have more power in real life than we'd like to believe."
I find that to be very true!
When I want to invite lucid dreaming, I'll almost always be able to explore it if I take the time before going to sleep to slowly go through the whole body and consciously relax each body part. I start at my toes and take about 10 or 15 minutes. Falling asleep in this deeply relaxed state, while maintaining a thread of awareness, often opens lucid dreaming.
I found as a child that each dream seemed to have an agenda, and if I stepped too far off the tale's path, I'd wake up. I soon learned that kissing the girl I had a crush on, or trying to be superman, just didn't work, and instead, I needed to relax, go with the flow of the dream-tale, and enjoy the lucidity, with very minor choices against the flow.
A long time ago I did a little exploration in astral projection, and discovered that by willing myself up (flying) in the dream, I'd more than likely be astral projecting. Except that I was still "in the dream", seeing the dream. What was harder, was to open my astral eyes, thus banishing the dream, and seeing my surroundings, my sleeping body, etc. I only experimented a few times with this, and decided I didn't have the interest and knowledge to safely explore it more.
Another interesting experiment - relax the whole body, then as you slip into sleep focus on asking a question that is important for you. I've found interesting insights in the dreams that come!
Happy sailing!
Thank you for sharing your techniques! I'm going to try them over the next few weeks and see what happens. I've never heard of opening the astral eyes in a dream as a way of astral projecting, but I'd like to try that too. The only time I flew up in a dream, I ended up in the place where lost balloons go.
I've been able to step way off the dream's path and still stay asleep, but the results were strangely unsatisfying. I loved the sense of "look what I can do" that came from changing the environment, but it felt very empty. I came to the same conclusion you did, that it's better to stay with the dream story and explore from there. I still have some experiments I'd like to try, but they are more about working together with the subconscious than trying to make it my personal playground.
Let me know how it goes! I was hard for me to be alert enough to open the astral eyes (the dream stops). And I ended up feeling unsettled about flying dreams, thinking that I'm actually astral projecting all over the place during a flying dream, translating any being I meet into my dream as a dream image, and not really seeing and interacting in a clear-minded way with whatever was out there.