Aleksander Pushkin, the famous Russian 19th-century poet and short story writer, was 'controlling' his dreams even as a boy when he attended the exclusive school in the imperial palace of what was then St. Petersburg. To do this, he used a technique he had learned from his nyanya, or nurse, to whom his parents consigned him at a very early age. He would start to read a passage from a book (usually a literary classic) just before he went to sleep and tell himself that he had to finish it while he was asleep. When he woke up, he would write down in some detail how he had completed it in his dream, and then compare the dream version with the real one. Very often, the two versions would be almost identical. It should be said, though, that even at this early age Pushkin had read an inordinately large number of books and had reach ed the stage where he knew authors so well through their work that he could tell what was going to happen.

                    The famous Spanish painter, Salvador Dali was a self-avowed specialist in the art of making dreams do what he wanted them to. Many of his best known pictures had their origins in his dreams.

                     For us lesser mortals, 'directing' our dreams is difficult, but not impossible. It is quite common to be able to dislike a dream, wake up, decide that you want the dream to be more pleasant, and then to make it so. Research in the United State has reached a stage where it is now possible to use fairly sophisticated techniques of dream control as a form of therapy, to exorcize fears and anxieties in patients.