If in the early hours before waking, one rouses into sharper awareness and pays close attention to the dream with a sense of curiosity, this state of mind slowly leads to being able to consciously direct the dream.
As child, I had hundreds of flying dreams. They started in different ways: sometimes floating up through the ceiling and becoming an ethereal form that could "sail" the winds, or sometimes starting at a picnic with elves and fairies above a waterfall and jumping up to fly as birds do. But the most frequent form was to climb to the top of a high cliff, mountain or building and jump off to spread my wings and soar on the thermals. Always, I would fly south along the coastal cliffs and beaches, viewing them from the air, and then turn inland around the nearest village to observe the houses and the people, and then fly-sail home.
As an adult living in inner city warehouses, in my dreams, I became a pigeon and jumped off sky-scrapers to go looking for my mother. I was looking not for my real-life mother but the mother I had always craved, one who knew how to love. I learned to control these dreams by taking different directions in every flight. When I finally found the loving mother, she was an instinctive being inside me, and the flying dreams stopped.
My subconscious intuition had somehow taught me that the key was to mother myself.
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at June 22, 2018 5:53 PM MDT
I can fly in a lot of my dreams, I'm just not very good at it, especially when I'm in a panic. I can't remember being able to recognize it's a dream though.
Next time your dreaming, especially when your flying in your dream, ask yourself, can I do anything I want to right now? If you can, than your having an outer body projection, not merely a dream. Once you lose control of the ability to manipulate your dream, you are no longer astro projecting, just merely dreaming.
I have never had control of what happens in my dreams but once I realized I was dreaming and that whatever I did would have no consequenses in the waking world. I immediately tried to make out with the girl sitting next to me in the back seat of the car we were in. Unfortunately, she reacted just as the same person would have reacted in real life. She pushed me away and yelled, "What are you doing?" over and over. Oh well, it was worth a try. Still, I woke up and there were no consequenses.
A dream is when you tell yourself a story while you sleep. It is possible to judge the story, back it up, and rewrite it. Shortly after I found myself rewriting my dreams on the fly (so to speak), I found that my dreams became a lot more fun. And a while after that, I stopped remembering dreams. For many years now, my sleep has been totally dreamless.
Benedict Arnold 