Thread: General Dream rule

I think I understand what you mean. I've experienced a similar thing, though I've never really thought about it in this way before. My dreams also try to prevent me from doing certain things sometimes - but to me, it doesn't usually seem like punishment so much as prevention and warning. It's almost as if something in the dream is threatened (whether it's of the dreamer straying off some path, or becoming lucid and completely ignoring the current dream) and, to prevent those things from happening, comes up with its own threats. When I first started consciously trying to lucid dream, dream characters would often change somehow and attack me as soon as I gave some sign of knowing that I was dreaming. Or I'd wake up, or immediately afterwards have a false awakening which would sometimes trick me into thinking I was dreaming again and being under the dream's control, reabsorbing me in a sense. Just last night I dreamed that I became lucid in the middle of a nightmare while the characters were doing something I couldn't fully see and the dream faded. I had a false awakening, but I became immediately lucid again, only this time it was completely dark and I couldn't move properly or turn or will the lights on, and something came out of the darkness and pinned me to the bed, preventing me from moving. I'm not sure why this was, but I couldn't stop thinking/feeling like the dream wanted to conceal something from me.

I think this is what you're talking about, though I'm not sure, so I'm sorry if I'm wrong I've always thought of it as the dream being threatened or trying to prevent me from doing or discovering something rather than having some particular goal or purpose, so that's an interesting/new way to look at it for me. Unfortunately I've not really read or heard much about this from others, either...

What kind of goals are your dreams trying to accomplish/are you trying to accomplish in your dreams - do you mean particular goals (e.g. finding something or someone or doing a certain task), or more general ones, like making you feel afraid/keeping you from becoming lucid/flying/gaining any control? The dream rule being not to stray off too far from a goal kind of makes sense, but I'm not sure how one could tell what their dream goal was. Or do you just mean getting distracted from the things the dream is trying to show you in general? Do you have any more specific examples of your own?