Last morning (technically, since I'm posting from GMT), I had spontaneously gained lucidity, and this time, I decided to try pushing what I wanted to do... to bend the reality of the dreamworld as much as I could to my will. Turns out, it's not that easy actually.
A bit of an update on my lucidity practices nowadays:
Ever since I've stopped actively trying to gain lucidity due to the lack of REM hours (requires min 5 cycles on a regular basis) or lack of REM bursts (due to commitments and tight scheduling, and even with REM bursts, I don't have the time to slowly recollect and reflect). It had quite an impact on my chances of gaining lucidity. I wouldn't be able to gain lucidity unless something was really wrong with the flow of the dream. Nightmares or anything that was similar would automatically trigger lucidity thankfully, due to the unbelievability of it. But then I think what happened was my dreams all became more pleasant because of that... and nothing really exciting would happen most of the time.
So anyway, somehow or another, something wasn't going the way I wanted it to (I can't remember how or why), but because of that, I realised that it was absurd, and knew that it was a dream. I was in some snowy area (THERE'S BEEN NO SNOW THIS YEAR I IS DISAPPOINT) and I needed, or maybe wanted, to basically shoot off something from my hands to destroy whatever that was in front of me (I don't think it was threatening, but I did need/want to get rid of it).
In my previous dreams, to conjure something, the most helpful way would to be to look away, and look back, or reach out round a corner / under a cover to take it out, since making it appear in front of me was really difficult. Problem is, when you're trying to shoot out flames / laser beams from your hands, you don't want to not see it, because that wouldn't be any fun, so that really increases the difficulty.
Now, concentrating with all mental strength I had, I tried to imagine shooting a beam out from my hand... orange / blue (that's probably one cause of the problem. I didn't really decide on the colour to stick to). This may seem strange, but imagining does not result in the actual shooting. When dreaming, at least for me, I can actually separate the worlds into further two; one that's imaginary, and one that's "real". These two mix easily as expected, but they somehow maintain some degree of separation. Hence, I can actually "dream within the dream" (more on this in another post sometime). So, imagining kind of sets the stage, and then I need to concentrate to make it turn real and actually will the stuff I want to happen.
It takes a great deal of effort to do it, and I failed the first and second time. What happened was I just motioned some kind of motion which would be appropriate to beam-shooting, but nothing would happen. I got a little frustrated, and willed it to happen even harder. Thing is, if I don't have a very, and I mean extremely concretely, clear idea/imagination of what's going to happen, the chances of failing is high. In this case, what I only had was he concept of having a beam being shot out from my hand, but not the actual visual (let alone audio) idea. The more detail one has on the conjured idea, the better the chance for it to appear.
I gave up on that method after the second attempt failed. There's not much time to keep trying the same things in dreams, and if things get boring, your "grip on the reality" of the dream starts to loosen, and you loose the "immersive feel", which results in detachment from the dream, dream fading, and then waking up. That's why spinning is so often recommended. It restores the feel, and sense of orientation in the dream, keeping you connected with it (and disconnected from the real reality). So, I ditched whatever approach I was using, and instead, tried to conjure a ball of fire, that I could use to generate a flame from. This, was likely easier due to me having seen it in movies before, and hence had a rather concrete idea of how it would look like.
To conjure the fireball was the first challenge, and I used the don't-see-it method. Facing my palm away from me, towards the direction I wanted to shoot the flame to, I brought my fingers together slightly like gripping a tennis ball, and tried to summon a fireball. Then I slowly turned my hand back towards me so I could see if I had managed to conjure it. It was successful at the first try! A dark spherical ball that had lines (like a bare brain) all over it had appeared in my hand, and it was on fire! The texture was rather complicated, so when I was trying to observe it, I notice it kept on changing rather than remaining static (looks like a VRAM problem imo).
Using that sphere of fire, I managed to launch fire-beams.... or something like a flame thrower basically, at whatever I wanted to destroy by just motioning. (I can't remember whether I destroyed it or not. It could have disappeared while I was trying to conjure this). So finally, kind of succeeded. Sure took alot of effort, but I hope that this would help for the next time I try to conjure something. I notice that I'm not very good with causing destruction. Could it be that it's a rather complicated scene to generate? I have watched many movies and played many games which have scenes of destruction in them, so I doubt it's a lack of imagination.