I have had more unpleasant experiences than anything with lucid dreaming. I wrote about that a while back but I feel like the unconscious mind actively tries to wrestle control back from the lucid dreamer. I notice that things tend to go wrong with the things, actions, or settings that I would try to manifest, as though something was throwing up obstacles to prevent me from taking control. If I tried to dream about a nice place, it would be inhabited by some adversary who meant me harm. I conjure up a rifle to shoot the enemy with and it fails to function when I try to use it. I try to flee or fly and, like yourself, I am shot down.

I remember one instance in which I was traveling along a road in the desert and I came to a building with what looked like a loading dock (this was not where I wanted to go) and there was a presence there who meant me harm. As I mentioned above, I imagined a rifle and tried to fire it at the thing (which had taken the form of a thin man in a dark tattered suit) but it would not function. Suddenly, I had a companion, who seemed to appear from nothing and that person told me to use a spear and the rifle became a spear. I jabbed it into the chest of the tattered man but there was still no effect. It said something about "not the heart" so I thrust the spear into its throat and it screamed and released light from its wound.

At that point, I had lost control and I had slipped from a lucid state to a normal dream. I had forgotten that this was not "real." I woke up shortly after that with a rather vivid memory of the event which has faded very little over time.

Some people would attach some kind of "supernatural" significance to all that and I won't tell them they are wrong but I can see how a lot of comes out of the struggle between the conscious and unconscious. The broken rifle, for example makes perfect sense. When you fire one, your part of the act is aiming and depressing the trigger. My mind did those things but because it was in my mind, there was no noise or concussion for me to feel so it seemed not to work. The adversarial, encounters seem to work well here too. The unconscious mind whats me to stop meddling in it's business so it sends something to stop me. That being said, It would be way cooler to go around thinking that I slew some non-corporeal predator in ethereal combat lol.