I became interested in the subject of guided dreaming because I’ve had a recurring nightmare all my life about being swept up into the sky by a tornado. I heard that if you can figure out while you’re dreaming that you are dreaming, you can make the dream into anything you want. Usually when I had the tornado dream, I would ask myself, “Is this that nightmare again?” and look around to see if things seemed too real to be a dream. Oh, yes, things seemed very real. This wasn’t a useful test. So I got a book about it that said one of the things one could do to convince themselves they were dreaming is to look at their watch, remember the time, look away for a moment, and then check the time again. If your watch says 3:00, and two seconds later it says 9:00, the reality test has been failed. You’re dreaming! Then you get to decide what happens next instead of being buffetted about by tornados for a while. Some may wake up and say, “Well, it was only a dream… I’m fine, really. No harm done.” Umm… For that period of time I believe I’m in a tornado, it’s just as frightening as if it actually is happening. I don’t feel unharmed.

So, I turned the tornados into gentle little breezes that twirled the leaves playfully. And away the leaves went, dancing happily. I don’t have that nightmare anymore.

A few days later, I again realized I was in dreamland, and I was ready for it. I wanted to go float on a cloud, and fly over the world like Aladdin did on his magic carpet. So I went up to a cloud and floated around. There was a man on the cloud who said, in a kind of huffy way, “You can’t float on a cloud!” “Oh, yes I can, because I’m dreaming!” He didn’t have an answer for this, and looked like he’d like to argue with me about it, but couldn’t think of any good argument. So we flew around together until I was bored with it and woke up.

But the part of you that makes up your dreams doesn’t want you taking control. I plotted during my waking hours against my dream self, writing out dreams I intended to have that would let me do things I’d like to do. Go to the ball in a pumpkin, or something. Well, this seemed to set my dream self into a panic. No sir! We weren’t going to no ball in a pumpkin!! The next time I tried to test whether I was dreaming, I wasn’t wearing a watch! What to do? When I woke up, I decided to look for a clock next time. It wasn’t long, and I had the chance to check a clock for the time in dreamland. Ha ha! I was off to the ball! I won! I won! Well, I won the battle, but I lost the war, because the next time, my dream self let me wear a watch, but then when I checked it the second time, it had turned into a bracelet. Again, I was totally defeated, not being able to figure out that watches turning into bracelets is also not reality. I gave up for a while on controlling my dreams, seeing my dream self was so upset about it. I’ll try it again though.