If you’ve read the above, I have an exercise that you can do. As I’ve said, there are no tricks, no arcane or esoteric methodologies for obtaining the master key: only intelligent self-criticism and mental dedication. At the same time, some people learn best by having something to do, so here is a very concrete set of instructions for you to run through, if you find that helpful.
A Dream about Control
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1.) Choose a spot that’s easy to get to from your bedroom. Make it somewhere outside your bedroom, though, so that it requires conscious effort to get there. Perhaps it’s through a door. If you’re still at the stage of dream control where you’re often placed in your house and find it hard to leave, this exercise should still be very easy. I chose a part of my garden.
2.) While awake, go to the place you’ve chosen. Quiet your mind, and explore it thoroughly with your senses, all five of them. Unlike the grounding exercises you’ve probably learned, I don’t need you to devote your attention to particular impressions such as a vivid colour or a strong smell, though you’re free to do so if you wish. Instead, I want you to think about how real the scene is, and, more importantly, how it continues to exist second after second, minute after minute, with effortless ease, without any anxiety from yourself. Really notice your innate sense of confidence, even of trust and gratitude, that reality will keep being there for you, without any action from yourself.It just…carries on, in all its glory. Just see how that flower is still there, amazing! See how a car drives past in the street. Notice how it’s the same colour when it enters your view and when it leaves at the other end. Take a book with you and read a page - marvel at how clear and lucid the text is. Wonder at how the scene is still there when you look up again. Of course it’s still there, it’s real life, that’s what you’d expect. You’re beginning to learn to expect that in your dreams, too.
3.) Next, think about control. Pick an easy task, like walking. See how responsive and eager the world is to accept your commands! You barely have to think, and your legs are moving freely. You can jump with no problem. Anything you want to touch, taste, pick up, you can. If someone else is in the house, call them over and have a conversation. See how easy that was, too! Summoning, checked off. If you have a day free, try doing this every hour throughout the day, always paying attention to how stable and enduring the scene is. It was there in the morning and it’s still there now. How could it ever be otherwise?
Now, you’ll have noticed that what we’re doing here is incubating a lucid dream, the very subject matter of which is how easy it is to lucid dream!. For a beginner, this is the best possible subject.
4.) When you next become lucid while asleep, go to the spot you chose in waking life. All you have to do is establish that connexion - your mind will do the rest for you. You don’t have to imagine: imagining is effortful and can cause anxiety if you think you’re not “doing it well enough”, if the images aren’t becoming real. The whole point of this method is that all you have to do is remember, which is the easiest thing in the world. All your sensations and thoughts about how easy, how solid, how consistent your experience was will flood back, creating a dream that already begins to erode your expectations about the difficulty of lucid control and consistency. Stay there a while. Close your eyes, read a book, lie down - the dream is still there, just as it was in reality. That little chink in the armour, that first bit of erosion, presented incontrovertibly to your senses - the whispering assurance “this is easy!” - is all you need. The lucid dream monster will never look as fierce again.
What we’ve started to do is to take the “Lucid Dream Mindset”, a fictional collection of rules and challenges you’ve imposed on yourself, the fundamental effect of which is to make you think lucid dreams are different from and less fulfilling than waking life, and to replace it with a “Reality Mindset”, where everything happens easily and naturally without effort, because that’s how real life works. Importing your expectations and critical faculties from real life into the dream is the whole object of this exercise. Eventually, that old, cramped, cheap “Lucid Universe” that you keep getting stuck in will be obliterated by a “Reality Universe”, where everything exists freely of its own accord, with infinite detail, and your control of your actions is instinctive. As you advance, you can start to add things on top of that. Try driving out and visiting somewhere less familiar. Go there in the dream, too. Very soon, your expectations of ease will transfer even to the most complex scenes and tasks.
Before very long, you’ll completely replace your belief in the fickleness of lucid dreams with an expectation that they have a right to be nothing less than real - accept no substitutes. At that point, you will possess the master key. In fact, you already do.
De Ruyter has a maxim for you. Lucid dreaming is either impossible or easy. The process by which it moves from being impossible to being easy is known as “practice”. This process is infallible. The one thing lucid dreaming never is, is difficult. If it’s difficult, you’re doing it wrong! 
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): I decided to appreciate every lucid moment. I no longer distinguish between a succesfull and a ‘failed’ ld. I mark every (semi-)lucid experience as valuable, some steps are tiny, some are huge, all steps are contributing to the practice.
