When I was pretty young I had a recurrent dream about going back to school. I am thinking I had to be age 6 because it featured the new addition to Lincoln School which was built over the summer between kindergarten and first grade. It was a typical human nightmare of finding myself in a well-defined place which turned out not to be the specified place at all and thereafter losing all personal agency -- which is what makes the dream a nightmare.
I the child was pretty annoyed at having this dream recurring so often. My solution was to resolve to wake up and so escape the cycle. Dreams have no power over you if you can control when they end. I can not remember how much of this was my own concept; it seems quite probable that my mother had suggested something along that line. (And where would she have gotten the idea? This is why in actual reality we need families and cultures to surround us growing up.)
Specifically, inside the dream I left school through the new door and found myself on Shawano Avenue. But the houses across the street were the wrong houses. In real life across the street was the block where I lived; had the houses been the right houses I could have cut through the block and come out in my own yard or in the neighbors' yard. This is the point where the nightmare blossomed its dark flowers. But this time I insisted that I was dreaming. Since my little 6 year old mind could not raise me to consciousness I went back inside the school building and asked the person there (apparently a school secretary or clerk) to wake me up.
In the dreamstate reality the child sought out a responsible adult to exercise agency over the dreamstate; in actual reality it was my own mind exercising control over itself.
Obviously I have never been afraid of asking for help from the official powers, at least if "asking" is understood to mean directing officialdom precisely what help they were to be providing to me. Thus by taking on the dream role of competenct adult the child commanded the mental world.
Yesterday I read about avatar therapy in which modern adult psychology is beginning to catch up with my childhood self-competence. I have never had any voices in my head. I don't even know I have met people with voices in their heads (though I might have). But the new therapy is applying the same basic strategy which I applied to my nightmares. With the new therapy patients are engaging with the voices in their heads and exercising agency over their own thoughts:
"I'm going to lay down some rules," Claire said. "We can still talk, but on my terms, not yours." [1]
In the actual reality game the player has more plays available than we usually realize and more power than we typically claim. There is more reality than we make use of. When I see an example I say, "Of course we have more control over our own reality!" I have seen this in my own life and in the lives of others. How is it that we so easily forget and submit ourselves to that sliver of actual reality we find most familiar?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/29/acute-psychosis-inner-voices-avatar-therapy-psychiatry