This idea of being able to control dreams is a little bit misleading. If one could completely control dreams with the waking ego intact, this would be working against what the dream realities are all about: teaching us about the parts of ourselves that we do not know much about, the unconscious parts. The dream ego is much the same as the waking ego, but it is more flexible than the waking ego, most importantly because it cannot be harmed in the dream the way the waking ego can. Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold say in their book Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), "The person, or dream ego, that we experience being in the dream is the same as our waking consciousness. It constantly influences the events of the dream through its expectations and biases, just as it does in waking life. The essential difference in the lucid dream is that the ego is aware that the experience is a dream. This allows the ego more freedom of choice and creative responsibility in finding the best way to act in the dream… Your expectations and assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious, about what dreams are like, determine to a remarkable extent the precise form your dreams take."

The usefulness of waking up in the dream is control of the self, rather than control of the dream. Control of the self means that one can decide what one wants to do inside the experience. One can decide how one wants to act in a spirit of co-operation with what is presented to the dream ego in the form of events and occurrences.

Jeremy Taylor, in his book Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), puts down the "rhetoric of popular promoters of lucid dreaming who regularly promise that if you buy their books or listen to their training tapes you will learn to control your dreams. In my view, this is simply false advertising since control is impossible, increased influence is all that can be achieved, and it is a much more interesting and valuable accomplishment than 'control' would be, even if it were possible." He goes on to say that it is about co-operating with what the dream is trying to help us evolve in ourselves rather than over-riding our inner teacher. "It is my experience that the dreamer will then inevitably meet the same or a similar situation again, either later in the same dream, or in a subsequent dream. The multitude of lucid-dream stories that come from the Tibetan and other Asian traditions suggest that no matter how dedicated and skilled the lucid dreamer, the dream remains autonomous and defies counterproductive manipulation and control."

Jeremy Taylor pontificates in his book Dream Work (1983), "It is certainly possible to be preoccupied with comparative trivialities in lucid dreams, but the unconscious element of our being from which the dreams spring is so much older, wiser, stronger, more creative, loving and reconciling that we even imagine that it seems to me that even aggressive triviality on the part of a lucid dreamer…can easily be absorbed. To imagine that the dreaming unconscious could be totally overwhelmed and controlled by even the most practiced and disciplined lucidity seems to me to be simply hubris at worst, and at best a failure of perception and imagination." He finalizes this statement by saying that it is impossible for the deeper self to be fooled by such antics on the dream ego's part, even if it is successful in the short run at controlling dreams. "The dreaming unconscious is a center in our being which is so much older, wiser, stronger and more far-seeing than waking consciousness that to imagine it could be dominated or 'controlled' by even the most adept lucid dreamers is to misunderstand its basic nature."

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