"You cant flick a lightswitch in a dream." Or can you?

Feel free to move this if its not in the right spot, and sorry about spelling I just woke up xD

Okay, so I've been researching dreaming and lucid dreams and the like, and as far as I knew, lightswitches don't work in dreams, its usually used as a handy marker for lucid dreaming, a dreaming cue if you will.

Although, last night I had quite the dream, it started with me walking up to a strip mall, going into a random store, not sure why, just an impulse I suppose, I look to the right of the entrance and theres a small peice of paper with the following written on it.

Flick the lightswitch 25 times to win a supprise!

So I proceded to flick said lightswitch 25 times and walked over to the counter after, the lady at the front says congraglations! You've won a free tattoo and stencel! So she hands me the stencel and reffers me to the tatto place in the mall, I accept the prize and walke out the door of the store only to find out that it is suddenly inside West Edmonton Mall, as opposed to the parking lot before.

For some reason I take that fact in stride and head over to my favorite tatto/peircing parlor, hand the stencel to the tattost (Which has now become much longer to include a trebel cleff, took that in stride too for some reason.)

I get to the point where were positioning the stencel when I suddenly wake up.

Now the weirdest part of this quite weird dream was that a) I could actually flick the light switch and have the light turn on and off, and b) the fact that the whole dream was based on the flicking of the lightswitch when normally it doesnt even work.

Your thoughts?

Your avatar is WAAAAYY too flashy. It distracts me while I'm trying to read your post and it really is difficult.

Anyway, wall switches and lamp pull-chains/knobs never seem to work in my dreams. I used to dream about the lights burning out in the house and I could never find one that worked. The dreams were very vivid though as I still remember them decades later. Maybe that has something to do with the switches being a lucid device.

Did you see Waking Life? That's what your post reminded me of. Strange dream... but then, aren't they all?

Another good tip-off is trying to adjust light levels. You can't really do that. If you see a light switch nearby, turn it on and off and see if it works. That's one of the few things you can't do in a lucid dream. What the hell. I can fly around, have an interesting conversation with Albert Schweitzer. I can explore all these new dimensions of reality, not to mention I can have any kind of sex I want, which is way cool. So I can't adjust light levels. So what?

But that's like one of the things that you do to test if you're dreaming or not, right?

Yeah, like I said, you can totally train yourself to recognize it. I mean just hit a light switch every now and then. If the lights are on, and you can't turn them off, then most likely you're dreaming. And then you can get down to business. And believe me, it's unlimited.

Waking Life

You're not supposed to be able to read or look at a clock either, but both those things work consistently for me in my dreams. I've never tried the lightswitch though.

That is just a rule of thumb, and as you were just shown, not true in every case.